Daniel Fuchs keeps being rediscovered. Thirteen years after his death his three Brooklyn novels of the 1930s have again been published in one big book, by the Black Sparrow press (David Godine) which has also issued a paperback reprint of Fuchs’s writings from and of his Hollywood years, The Golden West, excellently edited by Christopher Carduff.[1] Fuchs liked being rediscovered, not surprisingly, and finding “he had become a kind of cult.”

He didn’t think his Brooklyn novels were “first class,” which deprecation he immediately follows by saying “The books are fine … have a good tenement-house yeastiness and scent of life in them.”

That’s so. All three novels are Depression Brooklyn landscapes with figures, lots of figures. The yeastiness, the life, is in the quick, energetic representation of the first- a ...