Capra Press

Publication Date:  July 10, 2015

“Often funny, often touching, disturbing, furious, sometimes all at the same time, Richard Michael Levine’s stories explore the mysteries of personality with compassion and elegance. This is a terrific book.”

—Herbert Gold

“The far-and-wide-ranging stories in this collection share two characteristics. They’re beautifully written and every one is strikingly original. We haven’t met the people in them before, or seen the world from their fresh and sometimes alarming perspective. Levine’s characters respond to mid-life challenges in ways that elicit compassion, amazement and nervous laughter, sometimes all three. They’ve moved into my mind to stay.

—Cyra McFadden

The eight stories and the novella that make up The Man Who Gave Away His Organs: Tales of Love and Obsession at Midlife have the cultural scope, time span, and in-depth character development usually found only in novels. Their mostly middle-aged protagonists have reached some crisis in their lives, when an unexpected turn of events or twist of fate leads them in new, unanticipated directions. The situations are often both hilarious and tragic. The locations—a holiday party for celebrity lookalikes, a college senior’s graduating performance arts piece, a support group for people named Irving Horowitz, a liver transplant ward—are intriguing and unique. The prose is at once lyrical and prickly, tender and sardonic, and always, sentence by sentence, read-aloud beautiful. Above all, this short story collection will entertain you throughout as few others have.

Richard Michael Levine http://richardmichaellevine.com/ has written magazine articles for many national publications, including Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, New York, The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, where he was a contributing editor and wrote a monthly column on the media for a number of years. His poetry has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies and collected in Catch and Other Poems. His bestselling non-fiction book, Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, was published by Random House and New American Library and has been translated into several languages.

Praise for Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County

“Levine’s account of the murder has been compared to In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. . .in a way it’s better than both of them.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“A frightening, disturbing book that illuminates the breakdown of the American suburban family. . .it deserves the widest possible audience.”

—Los Angeles Times

“It is difficult to imagine a much better book. . .this is non-fiction writing at it’s best.”

—Los Angeles Herald Examiner