Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn (New York Review Books Classics)

I discovered a 1950's Swados short story in an anthology of Best American Short Stories. It's a shame his work is neglected these days. Very human and well-crafted work.

Harvey Swados is a major talent who seems to have been largely forgotten after his untimely death in 1972. In these longish short stories, Swados demonstrates a mastery of story-telling with great psychological insight into his characters who come from all sorts of backgrounds. A writer with a Jewish background, he is certainly one of the few white writers to write convincingly from the perspective of African-Americans.

Great writer who eschewed fame, publicity and money--a recipe for the obscurity in which his legacy now dwells. But if you do stumble onto his work, you will find stellar prose telling timeless tales

Or so it should be--many thanks to the New York Review of Books Classics series for reissuing these beautiful short stories. I had never heard of the author before, and this book was recommended to me by Amazon when I purchased a few others in the NYRB series. I loved the title and thought, why not? I was captivated and charmed by this book. Five stars are not enough.The stories take place in or reference a Brooklyn and a New York that no longer exist, the post-World War II decade, when men wore hats, women wore gloves and everyone smoked cigarettes. The characters have all emerged from the Depression- and war-eras and are affected, but not hardened, by their experiences of privation, poverty and anxiety about death and mass destruction. The theme of each story is change, of growing up and growing older, and learning to live with loss and to accept one's mistakes. Each story is melancholic, but never merely nostalgic, about the loss of the past, which takes place through loss of both people and familiar places. To this day, every New Yorker loves to talk about real estate, and how the architecture that made up our youth is constantly being casually ripped down to make room for the new. At what point does the City you grew up in no longer belong to you--or no longer even exist? And what does that mean for you?The stories deftly handle some very difficult topics, including racism, xenophobia, abortion, divorce, child neglect and abuse, infidelity and class distinction. Some of those topics are still taboo today, and reading these stories show how urgent the issues were even then, and sadly, how little the debate has changed. The author was very brave to take on some of these topics at the time these stories were written, and to write about them so honestly: stories about abortion and racism, or women breaking away from husbands who don't understand them and don't care to, probably did not sell well.My favorite story is "My Coney Island Uncle", about a boy's recollections of his favorite uncle, an unmarried and childless doctor (who lives in Coney Island, natch, at the height of its popularity as a middle-class beach playground), and the summer they spent together when the boy was a young teenager. His uncle is remembered as glamorous, all-knowing and, as a doctor, nearly all-powerful--everything the boy's parents are not. Many years later, the boy, now a man, visits his uncle again. They are both older, and the boy realizes that it is now his turn to mentor another, and to take care of his aging uncle. That story is so full of love and kindness, and it brought tears to my eyes. I had a "Coney Island Uncle" myself and I miss him every day.Take a break from the bestsellers list and buy this book and enjoy it. It was my companion for a week on the subway for my daily commute and I almost missed my stop, several times, because I did not want to stop reading.

Very 1950s with women in the kitchen and goody 2 shoes characters. Could not keep reading.