Professor Gabriel Brownstein
B.A., Oberlin College
M.F.A., Columbia University
Research Focus: Fiction
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.