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

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 is a landmark.

“Leonard Michaels’ stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth.” —Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review

“Leonard Michaels was an original . . . with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab.” —Phillip Lopate, The Nation

“As good as any writer you’re likely to run across.” —Alex Abramovich, Bookforum