The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W: Fiction

by Gabriel Brownstein

Overview

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. 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," whose hero is born as an old man and ages in reverse; Brownstein's Button lives on the third floor, fading away toward infancy. In apartment 7E, a lawyer named Zauberman reenacts the life of Hawthorne's Wakefield: he abandons his family so that he can spy on them. Meanwhile, 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 what they see by thinking about the stories they know best. Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; Finalist for the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award; Chosen as a 2002 Book to Remember by the New York Public Library.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393324785
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gabriel Brownstein is the author of The Open Heart Club, The Man from Beyond, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award. He teaches at St. John's University in Queens and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Table of Contents

	Musee Des Beaux Arts	15
	Bachelor Party	20
	The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 3W	45
	Safety	101
	Wakefield, 7E	120
	The Inventor of Love	134
	A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E	156
	The Speedboat	175
	The Dead Fiddler, 5E	198

Editorial Reviews

"Fantastically imagined...reverberates with subtle emotional tension."— Chicago Tribune

"A breathing monument to childhood, to Manhattan, and in its good-natured way, to literature itself."— Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Starred Review. Marvelously smooth hybrid tales that prompt readers to think twice about the intersection of life and fiction."— Publishers Weekly

"Completely fresh...truly moving."— Salon

"[A] wonderfully unsettling, feverish collection of short stories—funny and haunting and unlike anything else out there."— Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing

"Uncanny, funny as hell, inventive on every page, Gabriel Brownstein displays sheer literary imagination and writes with impressive vividness."— Howard Norman, author of The Haunting of L.

"[A] master storyteller...There is no doubt, this collection introduces a great talent."— Martha McPhee, author of Bright Angel Time

From the Publisher

2003 PEN/Hemingway Award, Winner

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

Martha McPhee

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

Tama Janowitz

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

Dan Chaon

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

Howard Norman

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

Dale Peck

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.

Kirkus Reviews