Bernard Malamud

The late novels and stories of America's greatest myth-maker and chronicler of the Jewish American experience "Is Malamud an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations." --Cynthia Ozick " A] short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself." --Flannery O'Connor The long-awaited third and final volume of Library of America's edition of Bernard Malamud's writings brings together three novels and thirteen stories of the 1970s and 80s that reaffirm his place in the American pantheon. The Tenants (1971) chronicles the growing tensions between two male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house. Dubin's Lives (1976) is a fascinating portrait of a middle-aged biographer who becomes involved with a woman half his age while researching a life of D. H. Lawrence--an affair that unsettles things in expected and unexpected ways. God's Grace (1982) is a wildly inventive, darkly humorous postapocalyptic novel whose cast includes the lone human survivor of the Day of Devastation, a group of talking chimps, and other (speechless) primates--who try to establish a New Covenant with God. The stories in this volume confirm Malamud as a master storyteller, from the Kafkaesque unbridled fantasy of "Talking Horse" to the final "fictive biographies" of "In Kew Gardens," about Virginia Woolf, and "Alma Redeemed," about the Austrian composer Alma Mahler. Rounding out the volume are "Long Work, Short Life," Malamud's hard-to-find "casual memoir" about his writing life, and the previously unpublished "A Lost Bar-Mitzvah," a poignant sketch of Malamud's own childhood. This deluxe edition includes a chronology of Malamud's life and career and detailed notes by Malamud biographer Philip Davis.

Tochnye po psikhologicheskomu risunku, svobodnye ot didaktizma rasskazy Malamuda nesut v sebe opredelennyj nravstvennyj urok: urok ljubvi i sostradanija k ljudjam.

Winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book AwardKiev, 1911. When a twelve-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death, his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is levelled at the Jews. Yakov Bok - a handyman hiding his Jewish identity from his anti-Semitic employer - is first outed and blamed. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. What becomes of this man under pressure, for whom acquittal is made to seem as hopeless as conviction, is the subject of a terrifying masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Acclaim for Malamud: 'Malamud is a rich original of the first rank' Saul Bellow 'Malamud has never produced a mediocre novel... He is always profoundly convincing' Anthony Burgess 'One of Malamud's extraordinary gifts has always been for lifting the realistic world up, into the realm of metaphysical fantasy. Another has been to take life, lives, seriously' Malcolm Bradbury 'One of those rare writers who makes other writers eat their hearts out' Melvyn Bragg Of Malamud's short stories: 'I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself' Flannery O'Connor

Frank Alpine, a drifter fleeing from his past, runs straight into struggling Brooklyn grocer Morris Bober. Seeing a chance to atone for past sins, Frank becomes Bober's assistant and keeps shop when the owner takes ill. But it is Bober's daughter, Helen, who gives Frank a real reason to stay around, even as he begins to steal from the store. Widely considered as one of the great American-Jewish novels, The Assistant is a classic look at the social and racial divides of a country still in its infancy, and a stunning evocation of the immigrant experience - of cramped circumstances and great expectations.

God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood -- a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son -- a "marginal error" -- finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books. "Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations." --Cynthia Ozick

"An overlooked masterpiece. It may still be undervalued as Malamud's funniest and most embracing novel." --Jonathan Lethem In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention. When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it. A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.

The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

With a new introduction by Aleksandar HemonIn "The Tenants" (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.

With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all." Its protagonist is one of Malamud's finest characters; prize-winning biographer William Dubin, who learns from lives, or thinks he does: those he writes, those he shares, the life he lives. Now in his later middle age, he seeks his own secret self, and the obsession of biography is supplanted by the obsession of love--love for a woman half is age, who has sought an understanding of her life through his books. Dubin's Lives is a rich, subtle book, as well as a moving tale of love and marriage.

One of the great story collections of our time-Winner of the National Book Award for fiction. Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it appeared in 1958. Malamud had published two novels, The Natural (itself a classic) and The Assistant, but in these thirteen stories he found the voice that eventually made him one of the most admired and beloved American writers of this century. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of Chagallish artistic magic. In recent years, immigrant writers from around the world have acknowledged the book as a landmark in the literature of migration. Few books of any kind have managed to depict heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry-and it is these qualities that make The Magic Barrel so great and so deeply human a collection.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows the career of baseball player Roy Hobbs, a natural with a bat whose dreams of playing in the big leagues are deferred by a youthful indiscretion, but who finally becomes a hero. Reprint.

A struggling neighborhood Jewish grocer takes on a helper who falls in love with his daughter and steals from his store

Roy Hobbs, who knows himself to be - potentially - the greatest baseball player ever, has his career altered when a mad woman puts a violent end to his first attempt to join the league. Years later, at an age when most players retire, he tries, once again, to realize his lifetime's ambition.

Many of the characters in these short stories are Jewish, but through the author's gentle exploration of their predicaments, he illuminates a region that is common to everyone.

Arthur Fidelman, Bronx-born and raised, is a self-confessed failure as a painter. Pursued through the streets of Rome by the refugee Susskind, falling into the hands of art thieves, hand-carving wooden Madonnas, becoming a pimp, attempting to sculpt the perfect hole, Fidelman is a comic creation of genius.

The last remaining tenant in a condemned New York tenement, Harry Lesser struggles against rising panic and escalating odds to complete the novel he started ten years earlier.

William Dublin is middle-aged, a distinguished biographer seeking increased accomplishment and the key to his inner feelings. His marriage is stable if unexciting, and he lives comfortably with his wife in Vermont. Then his imagination is caught by Fanny, a young girl of twenty-three, and he is thrown into an intense, erotic love affair that threatens to destroy his measured, disciplined world and the lives of those around him.

New York Times Notable Book of the YearPublishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together fifty-five stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.

-- Publishers Weekly