The Men's Club

First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.

Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.

Leonard Michaels was a master of the short story. His collections are among the most admired, influential, and exciting of the last half century. brings them back into print, from the astonishing debut (1969) to the uncollected last stories, unavailable since they appeared in , and .

At every stage in his career, Michaels produced taut, spare tales of sex, love, and other adult intimacies: gossip, argument, friendship, guilt, rage. A fearless writer-"destructive, joyful, brilliant, purely creative," in the words of John Hawkes-Michaels probed his characters' motivations with brutal humor and startling frankness; his ear for the vernacular puts him in the company of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud. Remarkable for its compression and cadences, his prose is nothing short of addictive.

The Collected Stories