Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Throughout his career, Leonard Michaels (or Lenny, as he was known to his friends and family) was constantly experimenting with different ways to tell a story. Perhaps for this reason, he was a habitual reviser of his own writing, often creating more than one version of the same situation or story, and also producing collections that juggled different narrative forms and genres: Shuffle (1990) and To Feel These Things (1993) include essays and memoirs as well as fiction. The present volume comprises only Lenny’s fiction, though in the elastic sense that underlies his particular form of storytelling. The versions of individual stories included here are those that (as far as I can tell) Lenny finally preferred.

Lenny’s first two collections, Going Places (1969) and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), appear in their complete and original form. “Journal” incorporates revisions and additions made by Lenny after Shuffle was originally published. Three of the four stories from To Feel These Things and A Girl with a Monkey (2000) are reprinted as they appear in these collections. However, the version of “Viva la Tropicana” included here is the original form of the story as it was published in Zyzzyva and The Best American Short Stories, 1991.

One day in November 1997, Lenny sat down and, in just seven hours, wrote a story about a mathematician named Nachman. Uncharacteristically, he made very few changes to “Nachman,” which appeared the next spring in The Threepenny Review. Subsequent stories about the same character were published in Partisan Review and The New Yorker, Lenny was completing a volume of Nachman stories when he died in 2003. They are collected here for the first time. In a few cases, I have followed Lenny’s manuscript versions of these stories where they differ from the published versions.

— Katharine Ogden Michaels