The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W

by Brownstein, Gabriel

• ISBN13: 9780393051513
• ISBN10: 039305151X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

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 misfortunesmarriages, car accidents, love affairs, and adoptionsand make sense of what they see by thinking about the stories they know best.

Author Biography

Gabriel Brownstein won the Hemingway/PEN Award for a first book of fiction for this collection. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, The Northwest Review, The Literary Review, and The Hawaii Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York

Table of Contents

Musee Des Beaux Arts	15	(5)
Bachelor Party	20	(25)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 3W	45	(56)
Safety	101	(19)
Wakefield, 7E	120	(14)
The Inventor of Love	134	(22)
A Penal Colony All His Own, 11E	156	(19)
The Speedboat	175	(23)
The Dead Fiddler, 5E	198