The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt.3W - Softcover

Gabriel Brownstein

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747560102 ISBN 13: 9780747560104

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Gabriel Brownstein lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first book.

From 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-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747560102
• ISBN 13: 9780747560104
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224