Though Leonard Michaels, who died in 2003 at the age of 70, was a writer's writer who influenced a generaton of short story writers, his work has not been widely read for the past 15 years. Now his reputation is in for a revival with two forthcoming releases from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
In June, FSG will publish the complete short fiction of Leonard Michaels as The Collected Stories. The house is also set to re-release Michaels's short novel Sylvia, first published in 1992 through the small press Mercury House.
The Collected Stories includes works published as far back as the 1960s and is capped by the seven "Nachman" stories, one of which appeared in the New Yorker in 2003. Sylvia was originally subtitled "A Fictional Memoir," and developed out of a short story published in Shuffle. A roman a clef, the novel chronicles Michaels's tumultuous relationship in late 1960s New York with Sylvia Bloch. The couple married, but soon separated; Bloch committed suicide during an attempted reconciliation. The Men's Club, the acclaimed 1981 satire about men’s bewilderment in relationships, which FSG also has under contract, and is planning to release next year under FSG classics with the paperback of The Collected Stories.
The rights for Time Out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995, published by Riverhead in 2000, have reverted to the estate, according to agent Lynn Nesbitt, who represents the estate for Michaels's widow, Katherine Michaels. Michaels's uncollected nonfiction remains with the estate.

Here, writer David Bezmozgis remembers Michaels as an author and mentor.
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In a drawer in my desk I keep a photograph of myself with Leonard Michaels. It was taken in Studio City, in September of 2000, on the occasion of our second and last meeting. In the photo Michaels and I stand together at an intersection, squinting into the late morning sun. Behind us is a towering plume of water, a pale blue sky, and three yellow-clad firemen working to repair a busted, spouting hydrant. At my request, on our way to the La Brea Tar pits to shoot a segment for a television book show, we’d stopped for the photograph.

I was living in Los Angeles then, a recent film school graduate. To support myself, I’d partnered with a friend, and we worked mainly as stringers for two Canadian television programs, BookTV and SexTV. Our territory stretched from Southern California to Nevada, and we had filmed everything from an antiquarian bookseller in West Hollywood, to a father and sons in Los Vegas, makers of synthetic orifices. In this instance, I had convinced the producers in Toronto to accept a segment on Leonard Michaels, a writer unfamiliar to them but whom I admired tremendously.

I had also managed to convince Michaels

. The previous year I’d been introduced to his work and it had made a profound and indelible impression on me. I’d subsequently written to him with the interest of adapting one of his stories for a movie, and this initial correspondence had developed into a friendship. So, when he informed me that he was coming to Los Angeles to visit relatives, I proposed the idea of the television show. Perhaps as a favor to me, or perhaps because he was flattered by the attention, Lenny — as he was known to his friends — had consented.

"If we are going to do the television show," Lenny wrote, "please do make sure that the station really wants it. I don’t tour the country with my books, but a television show would be better than a tour, wouldn’t it?"

We spent the day filming Lenny in various locations, including the La Brea tar pits where some of the action in his book took place. He was then working on a novel, which he either abandoned or failed to complete when he died quite unexpectedly from cancer in May of 2003. Somewhere in the vault of a Canadian television station footage exists of Lenny — foregrounded against a mammoth fatally trapped in bubbling tar — reading from this unfinished book as well as discussing a literary career that began with the publication of his National Book Award-nominated first story collection, Going Places (1969). That collection was followed by a second, his landmark I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), and his first novel, The Men’s Club (1981), nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. During this period, he was hailed as one of the best talents of his generation, and counted among the most imaginative and accomplished American short story writers.

Raised on the Lower East Side, the child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Lenny took the urban, Jewish narrative places it had never gone before. His stories had an emotional and sexual directness, even a ferocity, beyond anything offered up by Bellow or Roth. The prose was witty, highly compressed, strikingly poetic, and had a propulsive, jazzy rhythm that drove the reader ever onward. For instance, describing a murdered friend in a story from I Would Have Saved Them … he wrote:

"In memoriam I recalled his smile, speedy and horizontal, the corners fleeing one another as if to meet in the back of his head. It suggested pain, great difficulties, failure, gleaming life rot. A smile of ‘Nevertheless.’"

For various reasons, Lenny’s output slackened during the 1980s, and though he continued to publish in the 1990s and up until his death — his later stories appearing in The Partisan Review and with some regularity in The New Yorker — his profile had become much reduced, to the point where, by the time I became acquainted with him, almost all of his books were out of print. I always regarded this as a gross oversight and injustice, even though I recognized that this was an injustice from which I had personally benefited. This was the irony at the root of my friendship with Lenny: if he’d had the recognition I thought he deserved our

friendship would almost certainly have never happened. Instead, I was fortunate to enjoy a correspondence and mentorship with a writer I revered, and to have him play a role, directly and indirectly, in bringing my work to the wider world. My debt to him is immeasurable.

When my book was published in the spring of 2004, a year after Lenny’s death, I felt his absence intensely. As I traveled to promote my book, I felt a strong obligation to speak about him and the influence he’d had on me. It seemed improper that my work should command attention — however minimal — while his was allowed to languish. I saw myself, somewhat presumptuously and hubristically, as righting a wrong, waging a campaign to resurrect Lenny’s literary reputation. Talking to radio interviewers, print journalists, or the smattering of people who attended bookstore readings, I brought up his name. If someone recognized him, their value appreciated greatly in my eyes and I felt a rush of kinship. When people did not know of him, I took the opportunity to enlighten them. It didn’t hurt that talking about Lenny’s work also felt much less morally compromising than talking about my own.

In the spring of 2005, when my book was issued in paperback, I was sent on a second tour. This time, along with Natasha, I brought along my hardcover copy of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could with the aim of reading from his book as well as from my own. In principle, the idea of reading from another’s work appeals to me, and reading from Lenny’s particularly. However, in most cities, I found something that inhibited me from doing it. Sometimes the attendance barely justified reading one of my own stories. Other times, the circumstances didn’t seem conducive — rushed, atmospherically off. But in the middle of my tour I was scheduled to read for almost an hour at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City where the audience would be composed largely of students from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the kind of people who might appreciate both Leonard Michaels and a departure from convention. What’s more, I’d been informed that the reading would be recorded and broadcast as part of the "Live from Prairie Lights Series" on University of Iowa radio. I decided to read "Some Laughed," the penultimate story from I Would Have Saved Them …, a short, satirical piece about a fatuous professor writing a scholarly book in the hopes of securing tenure.

Standing in front of the Prairie Lights audience, trying to suppress my nervousness, I began:

"T. T. Mandell locked his office door, then read letters from experts advising the press against publishing his book, The Enduring Southey. One letter was insulting, another expressed hatred. All agreed The Enduring Southey — ‘an examination of the life and writing of Robert Southey’ — should not be published. Every letter was exceedingly personal and impeccably anonymous."

I imagined the words flowing out over the fields and highways, and emanating like rare and welcome news from the radio of a long-haul trucker, weary commuter, farmer in his tractor, or mother clearing the dinner table — anyone who had never heard Lenny’s words, but who would be grateful to hear them.

David Bezmozgis is the author of Natasha and Other Stories (Picador) and is currently working on a novel that will be published by FSG.

Michaels is also the author of