Gabriel Brownstein

Professor

St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

M.F.A., 1992, Columbia University, FictionB.A., 1988, Oberlin College, English

Gabriel Brownstein’s new book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure, will be published in April 2024, by Public Affairs press.

His first book, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2002. His novel, The Man from Beyond (2005) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His most recent book, The Open Heart Club (2018), is a history of the struggle to save children born with heart defects.

Brownstein’s short stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology (his story, “No Time Like the Present,” won a Pushcart in 2018), as well as in The Harvard Review, Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All Stories, and elsewhere. He’s written reviews and journalism for The Boston Globe,The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Guardian, and The Village Voice, and he contributed the introduction for the Barnes and Noble edition of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

Brownstein has been a fellow at the nation’s leading artists’ colonies, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross. He’s been a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award, and the recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been on the faculty of the St. John’s University English department since 2005. He teaches courses in fiction writing, essay writing, science writing, and in contemporary U.S. literature.

Books
The Man from Beyond (W. W. Norton) 2005--a novel, September 2005
Also published in Dutch as De man van verre (Athos) 2006

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W (Norton) 2002--a collection of short stories

Also available in a Norton paperback edition (2003); a British paperback (2003), a French edition, L’Etrange Histoire de Benjamin Button, 2e Etage Gauche (Seuil) 2003, and a Dutch edition, Het curieuze verhall van Benjamin Button, Apt. 3w (Ambo/Anthos) 2003

Stories
“The Man with the Movie Camera,” in Film Comment, December 2003

“Bachelor Party,” in Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Paul Zakrzewski,ed. (HarperCollins) 2003

“The Inventor of Love,” in The Literary Review, summer, 2001

“Musee des Beaux Arts,” in The Hawai’i Review, fall, 2000

“Wakefield, 7E,” in Zoetrope: All Story, summer 2000

“Party Animal,” in The Northwest Review, summer 2000

Essays, Reviews and Criticism
“Fight or Flight,” in The Village Voice, Sept 29-Oct 5, 2004--a review of Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America

“Meister Singer,” in The Village Voice, July 7-13, 2004--a review of the American Library’s three-volume collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

“American Idle,” in The Village Voice, May 19-25, 2004--a review of Andrei Codrescu’s novel, Wakefield

Introduction to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (Barnes and Noble’s Classics) 2004

“Gender Blender,” on Nerve.com, September 6, 2002--a review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, Middlesex

“Ben Okri,” in British Writers, Supplement V, George Stade, ed. (Scribner’s) 1999--a 12,000-word critical essay reviewing the author’s work

“Imagining the Millenium, Complete with the Messiah,” in The Boston Globe, April 18, 1999—a review of Melvin Jules Bukiet’s novel, Signs and Wonders

“Another Kind of Death in Venice, and Recollections of a Life,” in The Boston Globe, August 30 1999--a review of Louis Begley’s novel, Mistler’s Exit

“His Lover, His Country, and Himself,” in The Boston Globe, December 28, 1997 --a review of Robert Olen Butler’s novel, The Deep Green Sea

“A Japanese Cinderella,” in The New Leader, November 3-17, 1997--a review of Arthur Golden’s novel Confessions of a Geisha

“Kazuo Ishiguro,” in British Writers, Supplement IV (Scrbner’s) 1997--a 12,000 word critical essay reviewing the author’s work

“A Sure and Sly Virtuouso,” in The New Leader, July 14-28, 1997--a review of Alan Isler’s collection of stories, The Bacon Fancier

“Classroom Booksploitation,” in The New Leader, May 5, 1997--a discussion of recent anthologies for introductory writing courses

Undergraduate Fiction Writing Workshop
Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop
Short Fiction