The shared qualities of friendship and the healing arts are the subject of this riveting memoir of one man's battle with heart disease. When, in February 1999, Jay Neugeboren discovered he needed emergency quintuple-bypass surgery, he embarked on a journey that just began on the operating table. ...
Although the voices and settings of these tales are diverse, their central concerns remain constant. Neugeboren explores the precarious nature of family life and those elements - madness, betrayal, loss - that often shape and threaten it. He writes about the mysterious, sad, surprising, and somet...
“Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of our most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction.” —Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times SET ON THE eve of America’s entry into World War Two, 1940 is built around a fa...
She slipped in his puke, she washed out his clothes, she dragged him home from Sheehan’s, she tried to believe him each time he promised to change, but she’d been a fool long enough. My mother was on the phone, complaining to her sister Margaret about my father, who’d come home the night before, ...
He descended slowly, glancing into windows of shops—olive oil and olive wood products, eyeglasses, hardware, perfumes, lingerie, auto supplies—and into open doorways that revealed courtyards, fountains, laundry hanging between buildings. He loved the curving stairways, the chipped stucco walls, t...
We were in the third grade then, at P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, and in those days basketball seemed far less important than lighting fires in alleys or knocking over the garbage cans that lined the sidewalks on our block. By the time we were in the seventh grade, though, basketball had come to mean ever...
Rich says, “my friends and I would hang out in front of Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played—this was when we were ten or eleven years old—in the hopes that someone would have extra tickets at the last minute and bestow them on us. So we’d stand there and look forlorn, and it worked out for us ...
(5:1) I was with Max Baer when he fought and defeated Frankie Campbell and delivered blows that, according to the physician’s postmortem, set loose Frankie Campbell’s brain from its skull and was the cause of Frankie Campbell’s death. I was with him when he fought and defeated Ernie Schaaf in a b...