It’s the birthday of critically acclaimed novelist and short story author Leonard Michaels (1933-2003), an author who evidently ranks right up there with the greatest writers you’ve never heard of. (I think. I’d never heard of him.) Michaels is known for writing about ordinary characters in bizarre and extreme situations and has been compared to Philip Roth; his prose is said to be brilliant and “economically lyrical.”

Michaels was born in Manhattan to Jewish Polish immigrants and his first language was Yiddish (but some reviewers have noted that his Jewishness, unlike Roth’s, was merely incidental to his writing). Michaels got his B.A. from New York University and, after a couple failed attempts due to ambivalence about the academic life, finally completed his PhD from the University of Michigan. He began selling short stories to all the most shi-shi places: lit journals like the Massachusetts Review, and Playboy. (Ugh. Sorry. I know they used to publish great fiction. But I stand by my well-considered and brilliantly expressed statement: ugh.) Michaels’ first collection, Going Places (1969), set in his own fantastical version of New York City, was nominated for a National Book Award, and his second, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), was also highly acclaimed. His first novel, The Men’s Club (1981), tells the story of seven men who talk for one night about their failed relationships with women; the novel was controversial and called misogynistic by feminists, something Michaels denied.

Michaels’ main theme in fact has always been “the way men and women seem to be unable to live with or without each other,” and he personally was married four times, which I guess shows a real commitment to his material. His “fictional memoir” Sylvia (1992) is based on his destructive first marriage to a woman who ultimately committed suicide and is supposed to be a moving and devastating read. Michaels taught at UC Berkeley for 24 years and spent most of the last seven years of his life living in Italy. He died of complications from bowel surgery.

NB: yesterday, January 1, was the birthday of the great E.M. Forster (1879-1970), about whom I would have loved to have written if only we hadn’t had a day-long internet outage in the area, and writing about someone on the wrong day is kind of cheating. Forster is best known for his novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924), all three of which have been made into movies, and if you’ve never read A Passage to India, run—don’t walk—to the nearest bookstore. I’ve reread it several times because what really happened in the Marabar Caves? WHAT? It haunts me.

Have a happy second day of 2019 with reasonably reliable internet and stay scrupulously honest to the data.