Michael Frank Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Michael Frank
Michael Frank’s articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The TLS, Salmagundi, and Tablet, as well as other publications. Michael’s travel writing has been collected in “Italy: The Best Travel Writing” from The New York Times. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story.

He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for almost eight years, and he was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

“The Mighty Franks”, a memoir, was awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Statesman and The Telegraph. It was selected as one of the ten best books of 2022 by The Wall Street Journal, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. “One Hundred Saturdays” received two National Book Awards from the Jewish Book Council, a Natan Book Award, and the Sophie Brody Award for outstanding achievement in Jewish Literature.

“The Mighty Franks” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2017 .A story that is both entirely familiar and extremely strange: about innocence, families, art, and love. This hugely enjoyable, and totally unforgettable memoir is a classic in the making.

His aunt, named ‘Hankie’, called their two families the Mighty Franks. However she added that Michael and she were a thing apart. Because they had pulled their wagons up to this secret campsite. They know just how lucky they truly are. They are the most fortunate people in the whole world to have found one another.

Michael’s upbringing was quite unusual, to say the very least. His aunt was his dad’s sister and his uncle his mom’s brother. The two couples lived just blocks apart in the hills of LA, with each grandmas in an apartment together close by.

Most unusual of all was ‘Hankie’, his aunt: a beauty with violet eyelids and leaves fastened into her hair, a woman who believed that conformity was death, a Hollywood screenwriter that spun seductive fantasies. Without any kids of her own, Hankie took this particular shine to Michael, taking him on these antiquing excursions, telling him all about the ‘very last drop of her innermost self’, holding him in her own orbit in some unpredictable ways. This love complicated the delicate balance of the wider family and wound up changing Michael’s life forever.

“What is Missing” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2019. gripping and suspenseful, this novel is a psychological family drama about a son, a father, and the woman that they each love.

Costanza Ansaldo, who is a half-American and half-Italian translator, is certain that she’s made peace with her childlessness. One year after her husband’s death, she goes back to the penisone in Florence where she spent so many happy times during her youth, and there she meets, first, Andrew Weissman, who is an acutely sensitive seventeen year old. And, shortly afterward, his dad, Henry Weissman, this charismatic New York physician that specializes in, it just so happens, reproductive medicine.

With these three lives being each marked by absence and heartbreak, of a parent, a child, a partner, or a clear sense of identity, this novel offers Henry, Costanza, and Henry the chance to make themselves whole as this triangle resumes three months later in New York, where the relationships among the three turn and tighten with combustive effects. Each of which cut right to the core of what it truly means to be a son, a dad, and, for Costanza, a potential mom.

Michael’s psychologically acute and masterful debut novel, which leads the reader with equal confidence through the light saturated streets in Florence and the polished and hushed halls of Upper East Side New York. It asks us urgent questions about nurture and biology, about parental and filial love, and about what we are willing to suffer to find out about who we truly are.

“One Hundred Saturdays” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2022. This remarkable story about Stella Levi (ninety-nine years old) whose conversations with the author Michael Frank over the course of six years bring to life this vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes. This is the deportation to Auschwitz which extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman still alive to tell the tale.

Stella Levi, with almost a century of life behind her, had never spoken before in detail about her past. Then she met Michael. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment this one Saturday in order to ask her a question about the neighborhood in Rhodes where she had grown up in a Jewish community which had thrived there for half a millennium, called Juderia.

Neither one of them could know that this was the first of a hundred Saturdays spanning six years that they’d spend in one another’s company. During these meetings Stella would travel back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age in such a legendary and luminous island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, started governing as an official colonial possession in the year 1923, and continued administering even after the Germans seized control over it in September of 1943. The next July, the Germans rounded up all of its 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and shipped them off first by boat and later by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey, measured both by distance and time, of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them got murdered upon their arrival.

Courageous and probing, sly and candid, Stella is this magical modern day Scheherazade whose tales reveal what exactly it was like to grow up in such an extraordinary place during an extraordinary time, and to build a life after such a place had vanished. “One Hundred Saturdays” is a portrait of one of the final survivors drawn at almost the final possible moment, as well as being an account of a transformative and tender friendship which develops between listener and storyteller while they both explore the fundamental mystery of what it really means to share, collect, and interpret the deepest truths from a life deeply lived.