Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn

“Swados has a fine comic sense of our epoch’s major poses and masquerades, and his work is armed with an exact contemporary wit whose targets are pretension, blindness, and non—life…But more than that he is concerned with the break—through into true feeling, the attainment of moral dignity and the linking up with others through compassion, and that is where his best achievement lies.”
— Commonweal

“The deep feeling and giftedness of Harvey Swados shine through these stories…He stunningly captures time, place, and person.”
— Studs Terkel

“Harvey Swados was a writer who stood apart from the prevailing fashions of his time. As a novelist and short—story writer…he took the social unit—the family and the factory, the intellectual community and the unions, and the larger social mass from which they derived—as his special field of inquiry, and there were years at a time when he was virtually alone among the writers of his generation in lavishing his extraordinary empathy and intelligence on such subjects.”
— Hilton Kramer, The New York Times Book Review

“A stalwart literary craftsman of the realistic school, Swados wrote a number of novels, short stories and books of literary and political comment and then died, in his fifties, without ever attaining the critical acceptance, indeed acclaim, that he deserved.”
— Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe

“Swados’s people are soldiers and lovers, runaway fathers, failed artists, innocents at home and abroad. Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn is that rarest sort of book — the necessary one.”
— Brett Singer, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Harvey Swados (1920-1972) was born in Buffalo, the son of a doctor. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he served in the Merchant Marine during World War II and published his first novel, Out Went the Candle, in 1955. His other books include the novels Standing Fast and Celebration; a group of stories set in an auto plant, On the Line, widely regarded as a classic of the literature of work; and various collections of nonfiction, including A Radical’s America. Swados’s 1959 essay for Esquire, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” has often been said to have inspired the formation of the Peace Corps.

Grace Paley is a writer and a teacher, a feminist and an activist. Her books include The Collected Stories; Just as I Thought, which gathers personal and political essays and articles; and Begin Again: Collected Poems. She lives in New York City and Vermont.

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