First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, Sylvia draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.
Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.
"Sylvia is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels's first wife Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide . . . At 129 pages, the reissue of Sylvia, though billed as a novel, has the power and the rawness of memoir."
