Mysterious, resonant, haunting; their echoes will stay with you long after you've finished his lovely, lovely book.

Uncanny, funny as hell, inventive on every page, Gabriel Brownstein displays sheer literary imagination and writes with impressive vividness.

This is a wonderfully unsettling, feverish collection of short stories—funny and haunting and unlike anything else out there.

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.

There is no doubt, this collection introduces a great talent.

The inhabitants of an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York City are the actors in five deft reenactments of classic literary works in this debut collection; the other four stories explore the fringes of comfortable late-20th-century life in and around the city. On West 89th St. in the 1970s and '80s, young Davie Birnbaum ("I was a spooky kid in my cousin's hand-me-down corduroys.... My hair was cut in a puffy bell") takes stock of his neighbors' eccentricities. There is Solly Schlacter, unfortunate young son of a disbarred proctologist, who plummets to his death on Icarus wings from the roof of the building ("Musee des Beaux Arts," indebted to W.H. Auden's poem of the same title). There is Benjamin Button, of the title story, a shady-looking young man who is revealed to have been born as a withered ancient, like the protagonist of Fitzgerald's story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." There is the mysterious Wakefield, who fakes his death and spies on his wife and children across the street ("Wakefield, 7E"). And there is Kevin MacMichaelman, onetime ringleader of Davie's band of friends and, as an adult, the demented docent of an autobiographical museum he has created out of his parents' apartment ("A Penal Colony of His Own, 11E"). Set slightly farther afield, in Cold Spring Harbor, is "Bachelor Party," in which the narrator's devoutly Jewish older brother tells of his bizarre affair with the daughter of an ex-Nazi. Brownstein's distinctively skeptical, faintly elegiac voice and sense of place link all the stories, overriding the anxiety of influence to produce marvelously smooth hybrid tales that prompt readers to think twice about the intersection of life and fiction. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Brownstein's first collection offers a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of the tenants of a West 89th Street apartment building in New York City. Incorporating elements of works by Auden, Kafka, Hawthorne, Singer, and Fitzgerald (the title story, in fact, is a reworking of a Fitzgerald tale of the same name), Brownstein combines humor, absurdity, and elegy to create linked stories that are strong enough to stand on their own. Speaking retrospectively, in some cases even beyond death, his narrators are brilliantly observant. In the voice of Davey Birnbaum, Brownstein demonstrates a talent for capturing innocence comparable to that of Salinger or Capote. Davey's accounts of his mid-1970s childhood and of friends and neighbors falling into madness and obscurity are made vivid by precise details and descriptions. Sympathetic and perceptive, unpretentious yet engaging, these stories are infused with a genuine sense of place; Brownstein's New York is a home for memories, a refuge for eccentrics. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/02.] Julia LoFaso, formerly with "Library Journal"

An elegant if somewhat mannered collection of nine stories, mostly set within the confines of a single apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. West 89th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue is one of those pleasant New York residential blocks made all the more pleasant by being off the beaten track of tourists and day-trippers. Built as an exclusive enclave for the well-to-do, however, the Upper West Side had become somewhat down at the heels and vaguely disreputable during the period (the 1970s and '80s) of most of these tales. "Musée des Beaux Arts," for example, offer a resident's recollections of a demented proctologist who lived upstairs and lost his son in a freak accident (the boy made a pair of wings and, from the rooftop, tried to imitate Icarus). "Bachelor Party" describes the perverse love affair that a Jewish graduate student at Columbia carries on with the daughter of his faculty adviser (an erstwhile Nazi). In "Wakefield, 7e," several schoolboys become obsessed with a ghostlike tenant who moves in across the hall from one of them, while the narrator of "The Inventor of Love" is a melancholy account of two gay men who adopt a boy from a troubled family but find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of parenthood. The title story is by far the longest and strangest: Borrowing from Fitzgerald's story of a boy who was born old and grew younger, it creates a history of the strange young man in the apartment upstairs who entered the world in 1912 when he sprang from his mother's womb as an elderly, bearded Jew and dashed his assimilationist father's hopes of passing himself off as a Christian. A careful portrait of a very small world: likely toappeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel well.

Gabriel Brownstein links nine short stories about peculiar people living in a New York apartment building. Scott Brick's performance is up to his usual high standards, though the occasional new voice is a welcome change. All in all, the different actors work well together and strengthen the sometimes loose ties that bind the stories. The actors, especially old pro Scott Brick, bring the characters to life. The repentant mentally ill son who has turned his apartment into a museum to the parents he disrespected when they were alive, the threatening proctologist, the lawyer who abandons his family, and even a dead man who tells his own story are pieces in this fascinating quilt of tales. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine