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 pictured himself as a writer until, in the mid 1950s, he...

Discussed in this essay: The Collected Stories, by Leonard Michaels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 403 pages. $26. Sylvia, A Novel, by Leonard Michaels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 129 pages. $13 (paper). During the summer of 2001, a New York editor asked...

Leonard Michaels, 70 Writer Thursday, May 15, 2003 Berkeley, Calif. -- Leonard Michaels, an award-winning short story writer and former professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley, has died from complications of lymphoma. He was 70. Michaels, who died Saturday,...

If Wilfrid Sheed’s new book (see review page C18) rings your bell, here’s another, oddly similar title also out this month: Stefan Kanfer’s The Voodoo That They Did So Well: The Wizards Who Invented the New York Stage (Ivan R. Dee, $24.95). The gang’s all...

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 sensibility sufficiently intelligent, flexible, detached, and controlled to negotiate the contemporary world. The characteristic setting for his stories is New York City—the modern urban landscape, violent, unpredictable, energetic, taxing—challenging and meaningful enough to be a "vale of soulmaking," dangerous and depersona...

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 as a compliment, may be open to misinterpretation, let me quickly add that the apparent extraordinary length of the volume is the result not of any … longueurs in the work but of a narrative and stylistic density so marked that it causes whole worlds to form, pass through their cycles, and vanish away on a single page. Where, for example, ...

[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…. The novel is the great test for a fiction writer—but a test of what? Peter Taylor, surely one of our best short story writers, once said in an interview that he suspected that a talent for the shorter form was incompatible with a novelistic talent. The novel, alas, is much messier than the short story, and some short story writers—the i...