Bernard Malamud – författare

"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 cruelty, the two men mourn together. In Malamud''s reading, the sudden descent of grace on the adversaries emerges with poignant force.

Discover the Timeless Brilliance of an American Literary MasterThe Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, lauded as "an essential American book" by the Chicago Tribune, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997. This comprehensive collection gathers fifty-five stories spanning Malamud''s illustrious career, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), including the immortal tales from The Magic Barrel and the unforgettable Fidelman stories.With an illuminating introduction by Robert Giroux, this volume showcases Bernard Malamud''s mastery of the modern short story. These diverse and generous selections serve as the perfect introduction to the work of this great Jewish American writer. Malamud''s short fiction explores the lives of Jewish characters with depth, humor, and poignant insight, cementing his place as a titan of American literature. An indispensable addition to any short story collection, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is a testament to the enduring power of classic Jewish fiction.

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.

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition Introduction 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."

"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.

This collection of short stories by Bernard Malamud includes:Idiots FirstBlack Is My Favorite ColorStill LifeThe Death of MeA Choice of ProfessionLife Is Better Than DeathThe JewbirdNaked NudeThe Cost of LivingThe Maid''s ShoesSuppose a WeddingThe German Refugee

With a new introduction by Thomas MallonDubin''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.