The Harold Brodkey Reader: Selected Fictions and Other Writings
A new selection of fiction and other writings by the late Harold Brodkey, one of the most powerful, polarizing, and original writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
With Harold Brodkey's death in 1996, one of the most remarkable, controversial, and tragic careers in American literature came to an end. This selection of more than 20 pieces--drawn from the three collections and two novels Brodkey published during his lifetime, as well as his three posthumous collections--brings much-deserved new attention to one of the most celebrated, important, and rewarding authors of his era.
Over the decades, Brodkey's work underwent a transformation unprecedented in American writing. Mentored by William Maxwell at The New Yorker, his well-manicured midcentury stories made him a rising star and drew comparisons to his contemporary John Updike. But in the '60s and '70s, he published an intermittent stream of very different work--shockingly original, intense, and explicit--that earned some of the most exalted praise directed at any writer of that period. Finally, in the late '80s and '90s, his work evolved further, in a monumental collection of previously published shorter fiction and novellas, and then a wildly ambitious--and vitriolically criticized--800-page novel. He seemed to create a new literary style for each decade, in a fascinating progression that readers can follow throughout these pieces.
While Brodkey's focus on the interior experience of consciousness is directly inherited from modernists like Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, he is also perhaps the greatest unsung progenitor of today's most acclaimed authors of autofiction, especially Karl Ove Knausg rd and Elena Ferrante. Again and again, he excavates and recasts the central experiences of his life: his impoverished Jewish birth family; the death of his birth mother and abandonment by his birth father; his prosperous, troubled adoptive family; the intense attachments he formed as a young man with other young men; and his impassioned relationship with the beautiful, privileged woman who became his first wife.
Though he was both a figure of the literary establishment and a radical outsider, Brodkey always played for the highest artistic stakes. Now, his work demands revisiting, not least to help us see his achievement more clearly than his contemporaries could. As this collection shows, Brodkey's work prefigures what have become central concerns of writing and culture today--sexuality, family, class, otherness, trauma, and identity--rendered in some of the most memorable, insightful, strange, and dynamic prose composed by any American writer of his century.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
