Böcker av Bernard Malamud

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 on the lone human survivor's ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud's definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir "Long Work, Short Life" as well as a fascinating autobiographic sketch, " A Lost Bar-Mitzvah," published here for the first time.

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.

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.

Designed to provide writers with insights into the way a master thinks about and practices his craft, this collection includes discussions of the novel, the short story, subject matter, work in progress, revision, and the Jewish experience. Malamud also discusses the responsibilities of the writer.

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new editionIntroduction by Kevin BakerThe 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."

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 vital for several generations of writers."His best novel . . . The Assistant is as tightly written as a prose poem." --Morris Dickstein in Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970

On the centenary of Malamud's birth, Atlantic Books is proud to republish what is considered to be the haunting masterpiece of one of the giants of post-war American fiction

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. 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.

This is a book about heroism - of sorts. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot.

A matchmaker finds love for a would-be rabbi; a shopkeeper dies because he cannot afford a doctor; a little girl steals candy; an angel visits a grieving tailor. Through Malamud's great gifts as a writer - humour and profound concern for the matter of human life - he transmutes the particular struggles of everyday sufferers into a strange poetry.