A New and Glorious Life (Short Fiction Series) [Paperback]

Michelle Herman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Short Fiction Series | Publication Date: July 1998

"Reading Michelle Herman's new collection is like eating Godiva chocolates, something so exquisitely enjoyable you can't get enough of it. How often,in this day and age, does one get to read a love story which is also a literary gem? These novellas are the stuff of classics."
--Marly Swick

"These novellas have a psychological depth and acute worldliness one associates with continental fiction. Michelle Herman's sympathies bridge generations and genders; her intelligence conveys both the lovingness and coldness of the way we live now. Her work is a sophisticated pleasure."
--Philip Lopate

"These three novellas are three gems, each with distinctive coloring and distinctive authorial voice. The winter atmosphere of the artists' colony in the title novella is captured in its unique mixture of aggressive companionship and loneliness, and frames an unusual love story played against a critical view of a marriage of two incompatibles. The highlight of this book, however, is the novella 'Hope Among Men.' . . . Herman's is a subtle, generous, humorous and touching triptych on the theme of love, oh, love, oh careless love."
--Josef Skvorecky

"In A New and Glorious Life Michelle Herman looks with intelligence, sympathy, and wit at the lives of a wide range of contemporary men and women--some of them eventually glorious and others sad but holding their own."
--Alison Lurie

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The novella can be a difficult form, straddling the immediacy of the short story and the more luxurious pace of the novel, but Herman balances these needs with aplomb in this collection of three long stories. Filled with warm, eccentric characters, each novella explores the difficulties faced by an assortment of individuals intellectually rich but emotionally uncertain. In "Auslander," the title character is a reclusive literary translator who confronts the brilliance of a poet who refuses to allow her work into public view. As Auslander is reluctantly drawn into the lives of the poet and her husband, both Romanian immigrants, the story moves steadily toward a tragedy that feels both inescapable and completely earned. In "Hope Among Men," a woman is jolted from her marginal existence by two men who leave her in rapid succession. This heartbreak is predicted early by the story's narrator, a gambit that only serves to engage the reader more fully as the story unfolds. Balancing these tales is the title novella, the book's longest piece, a journey into the emotionally stunted life of Gad, a composer taking a working vacation at an artists' colony. Though married, Gad begins an intimate, liberating friendship with Hannah, a poet also working at the colony. Unwilling to rush her characters, Herman explores the full length of this friendship, slowly guiding the story toward a bright, charged conclusion. Herman (Missing) writes with vivid details, but much of this book's distinctiveness derives from her sense of pace. She writes past the point where many writers stop, trusting her characters to deliver aspects of themselves previously undetected. (July) FYI: This collection inaugurates Carnegie Mellon's short fiction series.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887482848
• ISBN-13: 978-0887482847
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,602,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michelle Herman was born and reared in Brooklyn and educated at Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has lived for many years in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, the still life painter Glen Holland, and their daughter, Grace. Her first book, "Missing," won the Harold Ribalow Prize for best Jewish fiction in 1990; subsequent honors include an NEA Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, numerous artist's fellowships from the state of Ohio, and several major teaching awards from Ohio State, where she has taught creative writing and literature since 1988. Her stories, novellas, and personal essays have appeared in such journals as The North American Review, The Southern Review, Story Quarterly, American Scholar, and O, the Oprah Magazine. When not writing or teaching, she can often be found singing jazz standards. Visit her online at www.michelleherman.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Three glorious stories., April 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A New and Glorious Life (Short Fiction Series) (Paperback)

In A New and Glorious Life Michelle Herman responds in her own inimical way to the via negativa. Through three novellas she explores the ethical dilemmas of existence. When Auslander (the main character in the first) sees in her mind "the bundle of poems secured by a rubber band, surrounded by the accumulated clutter of years: stacks of letters; shoeboxes full of photographs, postcards, canceled checks; spiral-bound notebooks dating back to graduate school," she is considering the honor that must be paid to the poet whose work she is considering translating, to the testament the poet has left behind. Auslander (a stranger to the poet and her work) weighs her obligation to that testament of life and work. In "A New and Glorious Life," the central novella of the book, Herman explores the nature of creativity and sexuality, the integral tie between the two and the pull on each of our lives of Logos and Eros. In "Hope Among Men" Herman explores the relationship of love and hope with insights into the dark side of both.Herman does not assert that we will be successful in our attempts to counter the via negativa. But, oh, her characters seem to say, how we try, how we must. As she has said elsewhere, "I am interested in the conflicts that arise between responsibility to oneself and to those one loves."

Through the three novellas in this collection she explores the interior process that ultimately lies at the core of what matters. It is the way we wend our way through the actions of our lives with an awareness of the ethical dilemmas that life presents us. It is how we move toward understanding--and what more could we hope for as we move forward, one would hope, ultimately with wisdom. It is that wisdom that Herman offers.

--Mary L. Tabor

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book, August 24, 2004

By 

Maggie Levine (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A New and Glorious Life (Short Fiction Series) (Paperback)

I can't believe it took me six years to find this book. I didn't "find" it, either; my next-door neighbor handed it to me, saying he thought it was the sort of thing I'd like. (Don't know what this says about me. Maybe he thought because I'm an actor, I'm a romantic sort.) In any case, this was the best book I've read in a long, long time. It's damn hard to find contemporary writing that plumbs the human heart the way the best writers of an earlier time did. Think of early Saul Bellow, or Bernard Malamud. Think, for that matter, of Henry James--but with more feeling. Think Chekhov. I've spent a lot of time with Chekhov, so I'm not just throwing his name around. Think: hearts and minds, not STUFF, like so many of today's writers write about. If you care more about how people think and what they feel, and how and why they love, than you do about the "stuff" they do--then you'll love this book, too.

Also recommended: Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Claire Messud's The Hunters and The Last Life
Tillie Olsen's Tell Me A Riddle
Lore Segal's Her Last American (alas, out of print!!! but maybe someone will reprint?)
and see all of the above, if you haven't read them before

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling and unusual read, September 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: A New and Glorious Life (Short Fiction Series) (Paperback)

This was a terrifically fun book to read. I was only sorry that there were not more tales included in it. The puzzle that faces Auslander in the first story is one that I have put to friends ever since I read it. This has produced some fascinating discussions! The other stories are just as interesting and the entire book is wonderful, insightful and intriguing. I have given several as gifts and I always get rave reviews from the recipients.