The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W

By Gabriel Brownstein

Book Overview

This brilliantly inventive first collection captures the disparate lives of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street. Five stories are set in one apartment building, where young Davie Birnbaum watches his neighbors' lives unfold. The title story reworks F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, whose hero is born as an old man and ages in reverse; Brownstein's Button lives on the third floor, fading away toward infancy. In apartment 7E, a lawyer named Zauberman reenacts the life of Hawthorne's Wakefield: he abandons his family so that he can spy on them. Meanwhile, the proctologist in the penthouse plays Icarus and Daedalus with his misfit son. These are tales of literary voyeurism, as the narrators look in on other people's everyday victories and misfortunes--marriages, car accidents, love affairs, and adoptions--and make sense of what they see by thinking about the stories they know best. Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; Finalist for the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award; Chosen as a 2002 Book to Remember by the New York Public Library.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393324788
• ISBN13: 9780393324785
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating stories with an interesting twist

I loved Brownstein's take on some classics--they were fresh and imaginative.

Nice Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want to Live There...

New York for Gabriel Brownstein is full of some very odd characters, and he renders each of them awfully well, but I'm very glad that I don't have to live with his particular cast and crew. Too creepy! Too bizarre. But the writing sings, it jumps, it keeps you reading, and what more can you ask from that hardest of forms, the short story cycle? "The Bachelor Party" is chilling, and "A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E" does a masterful job taking on the impossibility of certain kinds of friendship. But that sounds pedantic...who cares what I thought it was about? The question is, what will you, gentle reader, make of these magical, unfettered tales?