Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

This volume contains 18 stories and novellas published over the last 25 years, for the most part in The New Yorker and Esquire. The short stories are heavily autobiographical but fall roughly into two distinct categories. The first provides scenes from the author's traumatic childhood, endured amidst his neurotically unstable, adopted family. "A Story in an Almost Classical Mode" and "Largely an Oral History of My Mother" fall in this category. The second category offers a narrow range of less family-oriented accounts--a mystical religious experience at Harvard, which Brodkey attended in 1951, and a series of other people's fragile love-and-lust relationships.