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

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.

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.