Bernard Malamud

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition
Introduction by Kevin Baker
The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball.
In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the

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Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers,...

With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon In 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...

Compassionate and profound in their wry humor, this collection of stories captures the poetry of human relationships at the point where reality and imagination meet.

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....

This is the story in art of the painter Arthur Fidelman, born in the Bronx and spending years of his life in Italy--Rome, Milan, Florence and Venice--pursuing his tumultuous career through adventure and misadventure. What perhaps saved him from disaster (Fidelman is a comic hero whose every next step is a trap sprung by bad luck as though his luck were good) is that he kept his finger in art, perhaps without knowing it seeking "perfection of the...

This volume presents between the covers of a single book the range and scope of one of the most distinguished writers in America, Bernard Malamud. A Malamud Reader contains the complete text of The Assistant, his novel of love and redemption in Brooklyn; ten stories from The Magic Barrel and Idiots First; three journeys-to Chicago, from The Natural; to the coast, from A New Life; and to Kiev, from The Fixer-and two long selections, "S. Levin in Love"...