Born in lower Manhattan on 2 January 1933 to Leon (a barber) and Anna Czeskies Michaels, Polish-Jewish immigrants, and raised in the city during the Depression, Leonard Michaels seems not to have pict...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Carol Oates
Going Places suffers from being unable to take itself seriously….
The best story in the group, "Going Places," leaves a man named Beckman o...
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Critical Essay by Anne Tyler
[The Men's Club] seems more a short story writer's idea of a novel—a mistaken idea, though understandably so, and an oversimplified one, in which the...
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Critical Essay by David Reid
Yeats says that a civilization is a struggle for self-control. "The loss of control over thought comes toward the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, the...
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Critical Essay by David Evanier
One way to evaluate a new work is to place it against works of art from other times that deal with similar subjects and settings, and determine whether the insights an...
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Critical Essay by Carol Rumens
The Men's Club is a provocative title that seems to herald male chauvinism's answer to The Women's Room and novels of that genre; a firing of defen...
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Critical Essay by Corinne Robins
The Men's Club is Leonard Michaels' version of a Walpurgis Night, of a Freudian male herd reborn in a group of California men, at least two of whom are ...
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Critical Essay by Laurence Lieberman
The key events in [Leonard Michaels' first collection of short stories, Going Places]—usually holocausts in the lives of his Leonard Michaels 1933...
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Critical Essay by William C. Hamlin
[Leonard Michaels] is a very funny man. Given a world where "no one feels anymore," where there is "no connection with elemental life,"...
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Critical Essay by Ronald Christ
[Leonard Michaels' stories in Going Places] present a weirdly heightened world where simple acts and feelings are translated into nightmarish reality by means o...
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Critical Essay by Elliot L. Gilbert
In Going Places, Leonard Michaels has given us what must surely be one of the longest 192-page books of short stories ever written. And since this remark, intended...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Decurtis
In his two collections of short stories [Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them if I Could], Leonard Michaels depicts the contemporary struggle to shape a sensibi...
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Critical Essay by Robert Towers
There is no need to overpraise "The Men's Club." It is more novella than "important" novel. Only three of its characters are develop...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Goodwin
[The] temptation to write a perfect novel is … natural, especially to a writer like Leonard Michaels, who comes to it by way of the short story….
Th...
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Critical Essay by James Walcott
[The Men's Club] is a talky little novella about a group of men who troop into a vine-covered Berkeley home to rake over their pasts and give their consciousnes...
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If Wilfrid Sheedâs new book (see review page C18) rings your bell, hereâs another, oddly similar title also out this month: Stefan Kanferâs The Vo...
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