First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, "Sylvia "draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.Reproducing a time[...]

Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and '60s and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the '70s and '80s, as a [...]

Leonard, a young writer drifting through the city, meets Sylvia by chance at a friends shabby Greenwich Village apartment. Hes instantly besotted with her striking beauty and quiet disdain, and the question of what to do with his life is resolved. In this remarkable semi-autobiographical novel, we [...]