New York in the 1960s. The famous, infamous, and not-so-famous marched
and partied side by side. Sexual liberation and political protest exploded. And the Music—above all, rock—opened the doors to everything.
For attorney Nate Kovacs, at first that hardly matters; in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer he struggles to preserve the orderly life his family has always known. But a disastrous case at his old firm forces him to reinvent himself as a civil liberties lawyer. That plunges Nate and his children, Artie and Karen, into the city’s cultural and political turmoil, especially when they befriend Danny Geller, an up-and-coming rock musician driven to break boundaries not only with his band but with drugs and violent radical activism. Their involvement with the city’s near-chaos and with Danny threatens to tear them apart and hurls them into a legal battle that could end Nate’s career.
Part family drama and part portrait of an era when regular people, young and old, took on the most powerful issues of their lifetimes in the courts, colleges, and streets of New York, CATS’ EYES tells the story of a family and a city on the edge of enlightenment and madness, crisis and joy.
Praise for CATS’ EYES
Michael Eric Stein’s Cats’ Eyes takes us on an absolutely authoritative trip to New York City in the ‘60s, and it’s though we had never seen it before. The novel offers an exuberant, cinematic treatment of that time and place’s events and characters, some of which are real, and some of which are products of the author’s imagination, which is so supercharged and fine-tuned that you can’t tell the difference. We hear all kinds of voices from the period—students, photographers, musicians, lawyers, freaks. And we hear the music, too, in a way that rings true and clear. Cats’ Eyes offers readers a wild ride, and I urge them to take it. It’s bumpy at times, and it’s not always pleasant, but it’s filled with emotion, verve, humor, and life, and it’s not to be missed.
—Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them and About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.
“A brilliant book, vivid and moving, with an astonishing richness of detail that successfully replicates an overwhelmingly vivid cultural and political era — not just a child’s delight at the World’s Fair and the mythic adolescent glories of Woodstock, but other much less benign events like the Newark riot and the clashes at Columbia University. The writing is often mesmeric, and the evocation of rock music is extraordinary. And the characters of Cats’ Eyes include deeply concerned adults and their perspectives, which is rare in novels of the 1960s. A big, rich, powerful piece of work.”
—Robert N. Watson, Neikirk Distinguished Professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at UCLA, and author of Back to Nature and other books on Renaissance culture
Author Michael Eric Stein has been a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, television writer (Miami Vice, the CBS television movie Higher Ground), and a journalist writing on film, rock, jazz, and Hawaiian music and culture for Films In Review, the Los Angeles Times, and Maui No Ka Oi Magazine. He is a graduate of Yale University and the New York University Graduate School of Film and Television, and currently lives in New York City.