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Harold Brodkey

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Harold Brodkey was born into a Mid-Western Jewish family, moving to New York and coming to prominence as a writer in the early 1950s. During the following four decades, he established himself as a modern master of short fiction. He contracted the AIDS virus and died in 1996. Some of his books were published posthumously.

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Books by Harold Brodkey

Average rating: 3.85 · 517 ratings · 73 reviews · 19 distinct works

	First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories 3.91 avg rating — 157 ratings — published 1954 — 8 editions	My rating:
	Stories in an Almost Classical Mode 4.00 avg rating — 126 ratings — published 1988 — 4 editions	My rating:
	This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death 3.97 avg rating — 62 ratings — published 1996 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Profane Friendship 3.50 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 1994 — 8 editions	My rating:
	The World Is the Home of Love and Death 3.86 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1997 — 4 editions	My rating:
	My Venice 3.54 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 1997	My rating:
	Runaway Soul 2.80 avg rating — 15 ratings — published 1991 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays 4.00 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 1999	My rating:
	The Abundant Dreamer 3.75 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1989 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Unschuld 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1991 — 3 editions	My rating:

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Series by Harold Brodkey

Nahezu klassische Stories (1 book)
by Harold Brodkey

4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings

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Quotes by Harold Brodkey

“I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.”
― Harold Brodkey

tags: fucking , sex , women

27 people liked it

“In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...”
― Harold Brodkey, Profane Friendship

tags: arms , gay , love , old , platonic-love , relationship , venice

6 people liked it

“the cold winds of insecurity... hadn't shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.”
― Harold Brodkey

tags: childhood , innocence

6 people liked it

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Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
Queereaders: 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read	34	280	Apr 30, 2012 07:30am

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