Most Popular Books by Bernard Malamud

A collection of thirteen short fiction stories, set in New York and Italy, by twentieth-century American author Bernard Malamud.

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."

Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves New York for the Pacific Northwest to start over, imagining that an extraordinary new life awaits him there. Soon after arriving, he realizes that he had fallen for the myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.

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

A Brooklyn grocer’s life is turned upside down by an enigmatic assistant in this celebrated novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fixer. The Assistant, Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store. Like Malamud’s best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven to be timelessly vital. A National Book Award Finalist

God''s Grace is an apocalyptic tale set in an imaginary time and place. It is an audacious story and probably the author''s most controversial work.

This collection of short stories by Bernard Malamud includes: Idiots First Black Is My Favorite Color Still Life The Death of Me A Choice of Profession Life Is Better Than Death The Jewbird Naked Nude The Cost of Living The Maid''s Shoes Suppose a Wedding The German Refugee

-- Publisher''s Weekly

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.

"During his teaching career, Bernard Malamud taught both creative writing and literature courses and indicated that he almost never taught his own works, since ''an author cannot dictate the total meaning of his work to a classroom.'' He was consistently reluctant in interviews as well to ''explain his fiction.'' He valued ''imaginative interpretations... whether I agree with them or not.'' He rejected the notion that there was a correct interpretation of his work." --

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".

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

S. Levin, timido insegnante di letteratura, si trasferisce in un piccolo college della remota provincia americana per sfuggire al caos di New York e a un passato di alcolismo e di sbando. Tra i boschi del selvaggio Oregon spera di trovare una nuova dimensione esistenziale, un nuovo impulso alla propria realizzazione umana e professionale, qualche soddisfazione lavorativa e magari anche l''amore; invece si ritrova in un ambiente ristretto e conformista, refrattario alle novità e diviso da antagonismi meschini. Né le cose vanno meglio per quanto riguarda la vita sentimentale: unico scapolo in una comunità di coppie sposate, il povero Levin si imbarca in una serie di relazioni scriteriate più vicine alla tragicommedia che al romanticismo, finché...

Bernard Malamud erzählt in diesem Roman die Geschichte eines Mannes, der einem verfehlten Leben in seiner Heimatstadt New York entrinnen will und sich als Dozent für Englisch an einem College in einer Kleinstadt im Westen bewirbt. Seymour Levin erhält die Stelle. Er durchquert den amerikanischen Kontinent und zieht mit hochgespannten Erwartungen dem neuen Leben entgegen. Aber in dem einen Jahr, das er am Cascadia-College verbringt, entdeckt er, daß diese Welt, gemessen an seinen moralischen Einsichten, für die er leben will, anfechtbar und unvollkommen ist und daß auch er selbst anfällig ist und sich abermals in Schuld und Irrtum verstricken kann.