SOURCE: McAlpin, Heller. “Obsession.” Los Angeles Times Book Review n.s. (19 October 1997): 14.

In the following review, McAlpin views the stories in The World Is the Home of Love and Death as uneven and a disappointing continuation of Brodkey's earlier work.

Shortly before his death from AIDS in January 1996, Harold Brodkey wrote in his memoir, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, that “I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.”

Thirty years elapsed between the publication of Brodkey's first collection of stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, in 1958 and his hefty second tome, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode in 1988. Now, posthumously, comes The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Brodkey's final volume of stories.

It...