The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W

by Gabriel Brownstein, Harlan Ellison Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Scott Brick, John Rubinstein, Harlan Ellison, a full cast, Arte Johnson

Overview

These nine brilliantly inventive stories capture the eccentricities of the residents of Manhattan's West 89th Street. Five stories are set in one apartment building, where young Davie Birnbaum watches his neighbors' lives unfold. The title story reworks F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with the hero fading away toward infancy on the third floor. In apartment 7E, a lawyer named Zauberman reenacts the life of Hawthorne's Wakefield, abandoning his family so that he can spy on them. And the proctologist in the penthouse plays Icarus and Daedalus with his misfit son.

These are tales of literary voyeurism, as the narrators look in on other people's everyday victories and misfortunes-marriages, car accidents, love affairs, and adoptions-and make sense of it all by thinking about the stories they know best.

Editorial Reviews

Dale Peck

Mysterious, resonant, haunting; their echoes will stay with you long after you've finished his lovely, lovely book.

Howard Norman

Uncanny, funny as hell, inventive on every page, Gabriel Brownstein displays sheer literary imagination and writes with impressive vividness.

Dan Chaon

This is a wonderfully unsettling, feverish collection of short stories—funny and haunting and unlike anything else out there.

Tama Janowitz

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.

Martha McPhee

There is no doubt, this collection introduces a great talent.

Kirkus Reviews

An elegant if somewhat mannered collection of nine stories, mostly set within the confines of a single apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. West 89th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue is one of those pleasant New York residential blocks made all the more pleasant by being off the beaten track of tourists and day-trippers. Built as an exclusive enclave for the well-to-do, however, the Upper West Side had become somewhat down at the heels and vaguely disreputable during the period (the 1970s and '80s) of most of these tales. "Musée des Beaux Arts," for example, offer a resident's recollections of a demented proctologist who lived upstairs and lost his son in a freak accident (the boy made a pair of wings and, from the rooftop, tried to imitate Icarus). "Bachelor Party" describes the perverse love affair that a Jewish graduate student at Columbia carries on with the daughter of his faculty adviser (an erstwhile Nazi). In "Wakefield, 7e," several schoolboys become obsessed with a ghostlike tenant who moves in across the hall from one of them, while the narrator of "The Inventor of Love" is a melancholy account of two gay men who adopt a boy from a troubled family but find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of parenthood. The title story is by far the longest and strangest: Borrowing from Fitzgerald's story of a boy who was born old and grew younger, it creates a history of the strange young man in the apartment upstairs who entered the world in 1912 when he sprang from his mother's womb as an elderly, bearded Jew and dashed his assimilationist father's hopes of passing himself off as a Christian. A careful portrait of a very small world: likely toappeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel well.

JUN/JUL 08 - AudioFile

Gabriel Brownstein links nine short stories about peculiar people living in a New York apartment building. Scott Brick's performance is up to his usual high standards, though the occasional new voice is a welcome change. All in all, the different actors work well together and strengthen the sometimes loose ties that bind the stories. The actors, especially old pro Scott Brick, bring the characters to life. The repentant mentally ill son who has turned his apartment into a museum to the parents he disrespected when they were alive, the threatening proctologist, the lawyer who abandons his family, and even a dead man who tells his own story are pieces in this fascinating quilt of tales. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169867978
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

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