Going Places

by Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He went to college and earned his B.A. from New York University and went on to acquire an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Michigan, before spending most of his adult life in Berkeley, California.Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Leonard Michaels's GOING PLACES, its idiosyncratic lyricism, its wordy verve and swerve.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not long ago I read an appreciation of the short stories of Leonard Michaels in Harper’s that coincided with the publication of The Collected Stories. I guess he was a sort of wunderkind with his first two collections in the late 60s and early 70s. I happened upon his first collection, Going Places (now out of print) at a used bookstore and just got around to reading it. It is an interesting collection that seems to embody both a hipster ethos within a proto-hippie framework. His stories are unconventional and challenging and oddly memorable. It seems that the last three works of fiction I have read were unmistakably New York stories including this collection that could only take place in Manhattan in the 60s, people elsewhere did not yet speak of perversion, Henry Miller, mortifying your Jewish parents, or self-loathing yet. The reviews that I read of The Collected Stories were most impressed by stories from this collection and his subsequent collection. I’d like to seek it out because this slim volume only contains a mere 13 stories in 192 pages. In the Wikipedia entry I learned that Michaels son was the lead singer of the legendary ska-punk band Operation Ivy that went on to morph into Rancid.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good enough that I felt compelled to log in on Goodreads after not having used this website for a year. I've never read prose as rhythmic, almost syncopated. Michaels' turns of phrase are incredible and idiosyncratic, including this weird type of near-metaphor that I'm not entirely sure how to describe--"Her crinoline smashed like sugar," for example. The Phillip Leibowitz stories are practically their own genre, manic nightmares played out in the structure of Jewish comedy--naked and locked out of a girlfriend's apartment, he decides to walk on his hands because "beards were fashionable." It's a collection, so some stories are better than others--the premise of "The Deal" is potentially great, but the execution is lacking; "A Green Thought" is a somewhat limp end to the Phillip sequence, too much internal mania without enough external perspective for it to ricochet off of--but overall it's a uniquely exciting experience, one with its own kind of momentum, a kind of frantic modernist realism-surrealism that I haven't encountered in anything else written in the 50 years since.

[Animal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad.
Pretty good in-between-books read.
I don’t generally love short stories, typically because they’re not all created equal, and this book is definitely like that.
Some of the stories are a little too hip and smack of “the times” for when it was written.
Trying a bit too hard. Too artsy, whatever.

The stories that did hit were awesome .

[Lawrence Lui · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but kind of dated and pretentious in its style and subject matter.

[Mathias Semmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

"City Boy" was well paced and does a great job of colouring the inside of Philip's head. The orgy one is also well written in how Philip moves through the apartment. Overall, it was a bit frustrating to read; the dialogue is very vernacular and often implied rather than expressed, which is cool and used well at times, although most of the time it gets in the way of understanding who's in the scene or where things are happening.

[Spraynard1979 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked the Nachman stories. The rest are hit-or-miss.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

honestly, fuck this book.

[Chris K · Rating 3 out of 5]

not sure... Prose is beautiful. found myself getting lost and having to reread a lotta times.
Wild New York.

Reread at some point and give a better review

[Núria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los cuentos de ‘De aquí para allá’fueron escritos cuando Leonard Michaels estaba casado con su primera mujer, la misma que inspiró la novela ‘Sylvia’, y tener esto en cuenta ayuda a entenderlos mucho mejor. Se trata de unos cuentos para nada realistas, densos, exigentes, casi impenetrables. Es como una mezcla entre Donald Barthelme y Franz Kafka. Soy de las que opinan que los experimentos mejor dejarlos en el laboratorio. La literatura experimental me gusta sólo en muy contadas excepciones. Por ejemplo, si me gusta Barthelme creo que es porque ante todo lo que quiere conseguir es divertir al lector. Y creo que si me gustan los cuentos de Leonard Michaels es por todo lo contrario, porque el autor ante todo quiere transmitir una sensación de dolor y angustia al lector. Están hechos del mismo material con que se construyen las pesadillas. Son cuentos ambientados en el Nueva York de los años 60, con sus apartamentos de dos habitaciones y sus fiestas para intelectuales pretenciosos, pero el realismo se termina aquí. Todos tratan de la violencia que hay en las relaciones humanas, entre hombres y mujeres principalmente, pero no exclusivamente. Es un libro muy compacto, al que cuesta entrar, pero una vez que lo has hecho a veces te tienes que parar para respirar de tan absorvente que es. Hay personajes que se repiten en varios cuentos, el que más se llama Phillip y parece bastante obvio que es un alter ego del escritor. Es también otro libro que parece escrito a modo de expiación. Muy pero que muy duro, claustrofóbico y angustiante. De los que una no puede olvidar ni que quiera.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Michaels's essays and his "fiction" books Sylvia and The Men's Club but I'm still catching up on his short fiction. Going Places is his first book and it has the feel of a writer trying to capture the times and places of NOW. When I say NOW I mean the 60s when these stories were written. At times there was definitely a high energy spark and a language-y swagger to these stories, but it also had the sheen of beatnik bravado, which can be both funny and somewhat off-putting. A lot of the action and dialogue seem disjointed and druggy, which, again, worked in two totally different ways--I felt compelled to keep reading and I also felt confused and a little too outside the action. Still, I could see the seeds of what was to come in Leonard Michaels's excellent later books, a couple of which I still need to read and will do so with much excitement.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

As stated in another of these things, this is one author who actually can/should be described as "a force." Sometimes the structural whatever or the verbal fireworks get in the way of (or completely overshadow) any emotion, but I think this is fine with the author. Yes, a product of its time, and not really the sort of thing I'm into at this point, but the writing is extremely, extremely powerful. Forceful, etc. Very masculine, yet vulnerable. Certain stories are fantastic where others are sort of a trial to get through. I Would Have is, I would say, the better book, definitely. Like I said, I'm not much for the gonzo absurdist imagist thing, but, that's not really Leonard Michaels's fault IS IT.

[Eraserhead · Rating 2 out of 5]

Michaels is a good writer but a terrible story teller. Many of the stories in here feel like clever little games with no guts, no soul, and no emotion. The sentences are brilliant, the syntax original, and the voice powerful, but the narratives themselves are bloated with wordplay and cleverness that does not build into a cohesive whole.

The opening pieces, about a rape, was easily the most powerful. The prose was still electric, but the topic had enough weight that it didn't feel like literary masturbation. Unfortunately most of the other pieces tend to peter off into comedy routines.

There's not a lot to move me in here, but perhaps the literary pyrotechnics on display are just dated by now. Either way I am disappointed.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just didn't like it. Phillip is the main character in most (possibly all)of the short stories. I never really learned anything about him. He has a lot of girlfriends and a lot of sex. Some of the girlfriends returned in other stories. Nothing ever really happened. Does phillip have a job? Is he a student? How does he pay for things? There seemed to be an ongoing fight with his friend over a woman. But I could be wrong. The style just didn't work for me.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this collection, and I did like a few individual stories, or at least pieces of individual stories. But the writing, while brilliant, felt a little gimmicky to me. Michaels prose is fantastic, and the book should be read simply for this reason. But the overall power of the collection felt flat to me. Perhaps I missed something.

[Jd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow, I ended up reading these stories about 11 times each. An interesting view into life and relationships that take place in 1960's Manhattan. I can still fall back onto it. I'd recommend it for anyone.

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Realtionships in radical New York. City Boy, Sticks and Stones and Making Changes all stand out in this collection. Michaels was a real craftsman-- his sentences, syntactic leaps and ideas are all his own.

[Rob Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

The words flow ever so effortlessly in these stories. My only criticism would be some of the stories are a little too one dimensional for mine, despite how enjoyable some of their sentences are.

[Josh Friedlander]

Chaotic, surreal stories of bohemian life in the 50s.