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    The Men's Club
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    The Men's Club
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    The Men's Club
    Ebook138 pages3 hours

    The Men's Club

    By Leonard Michaels

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An outrageous, darkly funny novel about manhood . . .

    The late 1970s. Seven men – friends, acquaintances, and strangers – gather in a suburban home in Berkeley, California. They intend to start a men’s club, the purpose of which isn’t immediately clear to any of them.

    But as the evening wears on and the drinks flow faster, they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk – to unburden and to share, to try and comprehend their feelings, their insecurities, their lives.

    Kramer claims he’s slept with six hundred women; Berliner and his wife beat each other up as foreplay; Cavanaugh – big handsome guy – is haunted by his former life as a professional basketball player. And Terry just can’t get over Deborah Zeller.

    The Men’s Club is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood and masculinity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateSep 22, 2016
    ISBN9781907970856
    Unavailable
    The Men's Club
    Author

    Leonard Michaels

    Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) was the author of Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, and The Men's Club, among other books. FSG will publish his Collected Stories in June to coincide with the reissue of Sylvia.

    Read more from Leonard Michaels

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    Reviews for The Men's Club

    3/5

    27 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The men's club by Leonard MichaelsEnjoyed this short story of what happens at a mens club meeting.When they first arrive nobody has any idea as to what to talk about but they are able to move right along.I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
    • 1/5
      Women take a beating in this 1970s novel about a group of bay area professional men who get together for an evening to tell their life stories, mostly about their sex lives and feelings about women. Girl friends and wives are all pretty much the bad guys here. THE MEN'S CLUB, published in 1978, is full of the touchy-feely Esalen kinda stuff that was so very much in vogue in that era. The men of the book are 'reacting' to the feminist movement of the times, but they don't come across looking very good. The slim novel reads like a story you might have read in Playboy thirty years ago. It has not aged well. Truth is I grew bored with it quickly, skimmed the middle, read the bloody ending (BAD wife clobbers drunken husband with a skillet). Felt mostly disgust - with the book and with myself for wasting my time on it. Fortunately I'd found it at a sidewalk sale for only a quarter. I usually hate to throw away books, but this one - into the trash with nary a twinge of conscience.
    • 2/5
      I don't know why I've rated this book so low. A couple books by Michaels are being reprinted soon by FSG (Collected Stories and Sylvia) and I thought I'd give this one a shot to see what he was like. The book is about a group of domesticated 1980's men in the Berkeley, CA area who gather one night to form a "men's club." They don't know what the club will be, but as the meeting starts they begin to share with each other personal stories about lust and power. The men bond during the course of the meeting, and seem to shake loose from the bounds of their everyday lives. They throw knives, drink too much and generally revel in embarassment (?). The book reads very much like a play- it takes place all in one setting and is incredibly dialogue driven. There were plenty of points that tickled me, but overall I was left thinking "so what?" No harm in giving it a read though, it's short and fairly entertaining.
    • 2/5
      Some funny anecdotes, but loosely hung as a novel; great eating and knife scenes