Bernard Malamud

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,...

"The sole tenant in a run-down tenement, Harry 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 in to the building. Harry 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...

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

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

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...

"The Mourners" comes from Malamud's National Book Award–winning collection, The Magic Barrel, about poor immigrant Jews-grocers, tailors, janitors, cobblers-whose suffering transcends the particular to become universal. Set in a cheap rooming house whose landlord and janitor join forces to evict a poor and aged Jewish tenant, the story ends with Gruber, the landlord, morally transformed by the sight of his tenant's misery. As compassion replaces...

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

Bernard Malamud's second novel is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in post-WWII 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

This capstone novel in Library of America's Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tension between two male writers -- one Jewish, the other Black -- who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin's Lives, a revealing study in the perils and and promise of love in middle age; and God's Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends...