Best Selling Books by Bernard Malamud

An Intimate Window into the American Immigrant Experience Morris Bober, the family patriarch, yearns for better fortune as he runs a grocery store, never expecting how two robbers would change his life. Working alongside Morris, Frank Alpine, with his own complex relationship with the Jewish community, finds himself entangled in a web of emotions and conflicting actions. As he becomes smitten with Helen Bober, he simultaneously finds himself embroiled in acts of theft. This tale of love, family, and ambition sits within the broader landscape of a New York cityscape steeped in a vibrant mix of Italian-American and Jewish cultures. The stark realities of 1950s Brooklyn color this narrative in a way that is as vivid as it is compelling. Like Malamud''s best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. With a blend of contemporary American literature and psychological fiction, Malamud offers an inimitable insight into the nuances of immigrant family life while shedding light on the universal human experience.

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, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic. The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

"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.

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.

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 story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin''s comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."

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

Bernard Malamud, author of such acclaimed novels as The Fixer and The Natural and winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, is widely recognized as one of the most important and enduring of American writers. Yet because he was intensely private about the way he worked, few readers are aware of his extraordinarily prolific expression of his commitment to the writing process. Including a wealth of never-before-published material, Talking Horse is designed to provide writers with insights into the way a master thought about and practiced his craft. This unique collection includes speeches, interviews, lesson plans, essays, and a series of previously unpublished notes on the nature of fiction, all of which offer an unparalleled look at the writing life. Each section of the book includes a headnote by Nicholas Delbanco or Alan Cheuse.

In Tsarist Russia, Yakov is accused of a ritual murder he did not commit.

Short stories and a scene from a play.

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.

This collection of short stories by Bernard Malamud includes: The Silver Crown Man in the Drawer The Letter In Retirement Rembrandt''s Hat Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party My Son the Murderer Talking Horse

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 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.

Bernard Malamud gave his first interview in 1958, his last in 1986. During the intervening twenty-eight years he was formally interviewed at least forty times. This book collects twenty-eight of the best interviews, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to more extended and leisurely conversations with academics and writers. Winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, this universally praised author of The Magic Barrel, The Fixer, The Natural, and many stories that are acclaimed among the masterpieces of American fiction appears in these interviews quite appropriately as an artist devoted more to his work than to discussing it. This collection includes interviews in which Malamud gives a commentary on each of his novels and on many of his short stories. What emerges from these encounters with this great author is a sense of Malamud''s deep, lifetime commitment to his art and to a seriousness of purpose. Though there is very little domestic detail or literary gossip in Malamud''s conversations, these interviews reveal the essence of a great writer that the multitudes of readers inspired by his books crave to find and retain.

Includes Malamud''s novel, The People, which was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1986, with the text presented as the author left it, as well as fourteen previously uncollected stories. Set in the nineteenth century, The People has as its hero a Jewish peddler who is adopted as chief by an Indian tribe in the Pacific Northwest.

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" and "Yakov Bok in Prison."

Six memorable episodes in the life of a man trying to achieve fulfillment as an artist.