Description:

First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.

Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.

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Review

“Sylvia is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels's first wife Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide . . . At 129 pages, the reissue of Sylvia, though billed as a novel, has the power and the rawness of memoir.” ―Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men's Club, among other books. FSG will publish his Collected Stories in June to coincide with the reissue of Sylvia.