A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories [Paperback]

Leonard Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

Michaels, one of the most highly regarded contemporary American literary figures and widely read by the discerning public, has long been regarded as a master of the short story. His stature can only be enhanced by this gathering of the best of his previous work as well as new stories, all of them written within the period of the early 1960s to the 1990s. Love and sexuality are the twin themes he continues to mine, and the specific situations he creates to explore these themes pinpoint in the sheerest of prose the absolute truth about relationships. Michael's trenchant, direct, and lyrical style, with not one word wasted, works as a tight springboard for conveying his vast knowledge about why we love who we love. No library's short story collection is complete without this career-defining compilation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cult literary author Michaels returns to the short story form with this set of 17: five from the '90s, two older works rewritten and nine reprinted from his celebrated collections, Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. Michaels specializes in chronicles of erotic obsession. In "Viva La Tropicana," narrator Herman muses: "I could almost understand what comes into being, like another presence, between a man and a woman, and could almost feel how they must touch lest neither exist and invincible nothingness prevails." Infatuations have shaped Herman's life since his gangster uncle, Zev, fell for his widowed mother, who later ran off with a lawyer. When Zev asks Herman to contact Zev's ex in Havana, bizarre and dangerous espionage ensues. In the title story, a divorc? named Beard falls in love with Inger, a German prostitute, who flees from his pathological intensity. Beard almost wrecks his life to buy her earrings, but loses the jewelry--and then encounters Inger again, on a train. "Second Honeymoon" amounts to a long, sweet exploration of Jewish bourgeois life in the '50s. Newlywed Sheila Kahn falls for Larry Starker, the waiter at the Catskills hotel where she and her husband are honeymooning. Michaels tells the story through the eyes of Larry's unsympathetic roommate, Joseph Kukov: as the bookish, contemptuous Joseph charts Larry's almost unwilling seduction of Sheila, readers watch Joseph transcend his resentments. Michaels's clean, cold prose pays dignified homage to the imperious demands of sexual connection. His erotically driven characters try desperately to mark each other, to enclose one another within impossible bounds. His remarkable talent lets his new stories join ranks with his old, surveying the line between eros and selfishness with an almost frightening accuracy. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Many of the stories in this uneven collection were written in the late 1960s, a few date from more recent times, and one is repeated in both the original and in updated versions, "Honeymoon" and "Second Honeymoon." The title story follows a group of friends up to a roof to spy on a rabbi and his wife having sex, with tragic consequences. "Viva La Tropicana" re-creates a time when American gangsters were in Cuba and Uncle Zev comes from Havana to romance the widow of his twin brother. The characters and places are powerfully presented, but often the realism is too hard-edged to engage the reader. It's too bad, since short fiction suffers from neglect in the popular reading, but this collection--one story of which was included in Best American Short Stories 1991--is clearly the product of an author who strives too hard for perfection.
-Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Mercury House (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1562791206
• ISBN-13: 978-1562791209
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,248,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing Change, May 8, 2000

By 

Webb Haymaker "Social Worker" (Connecticut) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories (Paperback)

What's amazing about Michaels is how seamlessly he transitioned from an experimental realist to a master of the realistic short story form. His early stories are marked by a linguistic self-apparency, though he's funny enough to keep it interesting. And, unlike others in this vein, his style is blatantly influenced by Kafka and Beckett. Sometimes the description in the early stories can be too thick, exhausting the possibilites of each situation. The language in the best of them, however - "In The Fifties," "Manikin" (The one about the Turk, I think) - have a wonderful interplay of signifiers, like poetry. "In The Fifties" is an ironized (sp.) list poem in the style of Ginsberg's "Howl".

The later stories acheive such a transparency you can forget how funny they are. Michaels is a master of form. They are narrated in a natural, subdued manner, unlike the glossy, journalistic style we get from some of our other first tier writers. The differentiated narrative strands merge together gradually as the story progresses.

Thematically, Michaels' stories are interesting because they are often set on the cusp of the sexual revolution, and there is much confusion about gender roles in relationships. All in all, one of the best books I've read in awhile.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you, Leonard Michaels, April 24, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories (Paperback)

I kept looking for new books by Leonard Michaels and then was crushed to hear he'd passed away. This book like his others draws me close and strangles me with ever new lessons about the dangers of intimacy, portrayed through his protagonists' relations with differently deranged women and one's compulsive attraction toward them. There is a sense his stories are happening in the late twentieth century but if Socrates happened to pop up in one of them and said, about marriage, "My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher," it would seem perfectly contemporaneous with what Michaels seems to be saying. Plus ca change...