(Nine Salingeresque stories about New Yorkers and their ma...)
Nine Salingeresque stories about New Yorkers and their marvelous eccentricities. This brilliantly inventive first collection captures the disparate lives of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street.
(It is in April 1922. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in Ne...)
It is in April 1922. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in New York on a spiritualist crusade. To packed houses at Carnegie Hall, he displays photographs of ghosts and spirits; of female mediums bound and gagged, ectoplasmic goo emerging from their bodies. In the newspapers, he defends the powers of the mysterious Margery, one of the most famous mediums of the day. His good friend Harry Houdini is a skeptic, and when Doyle claims Margery's powers are superior to Houdini, the magician goes on the attack. Into this mix of spirit-chasing celebrities enters Molly Goodman, a young reporter whose job is to cover the heated debate. As she wanders into this world of spooks and spirits, murder, and criminal frauds, Molly discovers herself: her true love, her place in the world; even her relationship to her beloved dead brother, Carl.
(This absorbing and poignant book is not merely the story ...)
This absorbing and poignant book is not merely the story of one writer's flawed heart. It is a history of cardiac medicine, a candid personal journey, and a profound reflection on mortality.
Gabriel Brownstein is an American educator and an award-winning fiction writer. He teaches at Saint John's University in Queens.
Background
Gabriel Brownstein was born on April 13, 1966, in New York. He is a son of Shale, a psychiatrist, and Rachel, a professor, Brownstein. Gabriel grew up in New York, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Columbia University. Born with a congenital heart defect is known as the tetralogy of Fallot, Gabriel Brownstein entered the world just as doctors were learning to operate on conditions like his. He received life-saving surgery at five years old, and since then has ridden wave after wave of medical innovation, a series of interventions that have kept his heart beating.
Education
Gabriel Brownstein studied at Oberlin College, and he got there a Bachelor of Arts in 1980. Besides, Gabriel graduated from Columbia University, where he got a Master of Fine Arts in 1992.
Gabriel Brownstein's first book was a collection of short stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W. When he wrote a book, he partly inspired by characters created by some of the literature's most enduring writers. Teenaged Davey Birnbaum is a narrator of five of the volume's nine stories. He is a resident of an early twentieth-century apartment building on West 89th Street in New York City, which called the Old Manse. There he keeps tabs on a cast of misfit tenants.
Gabriel Brownstein is forthright about his generous sampling from other writers. He admits it in the book's preface. Gabriel pays homage to Fitzgerald, to Kafka, who inspires the story A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E in which a boy creates a living shrine to himself, the "MacMichaelmas Museum of Kevin" in his dead parents' home.
The Open Heart Club is a personal history and a history of heart surgery. It begins with the visionary anatomists of the seventeenth century, tells the stories of the doctors (all women) who invented pediatric cardiology, and includes the lives of patients and physicians struggling to understand the complexities of the human heart. The Open Heart Club is a riveting work of compassionate storytelling, a journey into the dark hinterlands between sickness and health lit by bright moments of humor and inspiration.
Gabriel Brownstein's stories have appeared in"The Harvard Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Agni, Francis Ford Coppola's: Zoetrope, and elsewhere. He has written reviews and criticism for several newspapers, journals, magazines, and websites, including The Guardian, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Commonweal. He contributed the introduction for the Barnes and Noble edition of "Portrait of a Lady."
Besides writing, Gabriel Brownstein works at Saint John's since 2005. He teaches courses in creative writing and contemporary literature. Previous to working at Saint John's, he served as a lecturer in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Gabriel Brownstein is widely known for his story collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, which won the "PEN/Hemingway Award" in 2002. His novel, The Man from Beyond, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and one of Booklist's Top 10 Historical Novels in 2005. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in the Village Voice, Boston Globe, and the New Leader. His work translated into Dutch and French.
(It is in April 1922. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in Ne...)
2005
Views
Gabriel Brownstein thinks that most influence happens unintentionally, that people have to distinguish between influence and aspiration.
Quotations:
"Everything influences me. Anytime I read something, I think, in one way or another: I would (or would not) like to write like that. I wish I could write with a voice as assured and supple as Philip Roth's, with the wit of Lorrie Moore, the inventive geniality of Grace Paley, with the grasp of the culture of Don DeLillo, with the authority of a Saul Bellow or a James Baldwin. I read a story by Alice Munro or Stephen Millhauser and see possibilities, all sorts of things I want to rip off."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Andrea Barrett: "Brownstein has a poet's gift for the vivid image and extended metaphor."
Connections
Gabriel Brownstein married Marcia Lerner on August 10, 1998. They have two daughters: Eliza and Lucy.
