Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn

By Harvey Swados
Preface by Grace Paley

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter.

So begins "Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn", which gives its title to Harvey Swados's collected stories. In this beautiful and heartbreaking novella, Swados describes a generation "aflame with romance and disillusion," in search of pleasures and answers, and shows how the demands of love and life temper its hopes and fears. It is a perennial story, told by Swados in straightforward and lyrical prose and with tremendous sympathy, and without doubt one of the most enduring achievements of postwar American fiction.

Harvey Swados's many splendid stories speak of work, friendship, and family. They are about the common world, as well as the final loneliness from which the common world cannot protect us. And yet Swados, as Richard Gilman has written, was above all concerned with "the breakthrough into true feeling, the attainment of moral dignity, and the linking up with others through compassion."

Reviews

One of our liveliest, shrewdest, and most aware writers of fiction. His concern is both with the small close-up human scene as acted out between individuals and with the large, widely viewed landscape of American society. The texture, line by line, detail by detail, scene by scene, is admirable, genuine, unmistakably of this time. The dilemmas in which these people move are part of the general consternation of the decade. There is no story here which does not touch the reader by its true pathos.
— Paul Engle, Chicago Sunday Tribune

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

There is sadness here. The sadness of a writer who may have discovered late that the world is more devious than he had previously thought, and who may have been struggling toward new ways to express this vision when, only 52, he died. We can only surmise what other stories Harvey Swados might have written. The ones he gave us... assure him an honorable position among the vigorous ranks of post-World War II writers.
— Mark Dintenfass, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The stories of a gifted and distinctly American writer. Although he was devoutly committed to leftist politics, the short stories that grew out of his reflections on social reality are deeply fictional stories—never propagandistic, or even polemical. Swados has a tender heart. These are romantic stories about the hopes of young men and the ways in which these hopes are dashed by the limits of the possible. 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, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

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

The short fiction of Harvey Swados is among the very best in American writing. His moral passion and conviction, his immense narrative gifts, and his acute sense of what it was like to grow up and to grow old in this country at mid-century make these stories as vivid and contemporary as if they were composed last week.
— Arthur A. Cohen

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