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The Fixer (Paperback)
Bernard Malamud
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R517
R400
Discovery Miles 4 000
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A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award
"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.
New York Times Notable Book of the Year Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997
With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together fifty-five stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.
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The Natural (Paperback)
Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Kevin Baker
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R474
R397
Discovery Miles 3 970
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The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) 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.”
"An impressive gathering of the late Malamud's essays, interviews,
lectures and notes. . . . In addition to admirers of Malamud's
fiction, this book should also be of considerable interest to
aspiring writers, as Malamud is open and revealing about his own
creative process, and consistently engaging in his often
politicized and outspoken views on the artist's role in
society".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
"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.
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The Tenants (Paperback)
Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Aleksandar Hemon
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R544
R452
Discovery Miles 4 520
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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.
Winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Kiev,
1911. When a twelve-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death,
his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is
levelled at the Jews. Yakov Bok - a handyman hiding his Jewish
identity from his anti-Semitic employer - is first outed and
blamed. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime
that he did not commit. What becomes of this man under pressure,
for whom acquittal is made to seem as hopeless as conviction, is
the subject of a terrifying masterpiece of twentieth-century
fiction. Acclaim for Malamud: 'Malamud is a rich original of the
first rank' Saul Bellow 'Malamud has never produced a mediocre
novel... He is always profoundly convincing' Anthony Burgess 'One
of Malamud's extraordinary gifts has always been for lifting the
realistic world up, into the realm of metaphysical fantasy. Another
has been to take life, lives, seriously' Malcolm Bradbury 'One of
those rare writers who makes other writers eat their hearts out'
Melvyn Bragg Of Malamud's short stories: 'I have discovered a
short-story writer who is better than any of them, including
myself' Flannery O'Connor
"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
"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.
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.
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The Assistant (Paperback)
Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Jonathan Rosen
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R477
R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
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Introduction by Jonathan Rosen
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.
This is a book about heroism, and it is a strange one. What makes Roy Hobbs potentially a hero is his immense natural gift for playing baseball. When he is quite young he already knows that he may become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time. It is a long while before he finds a place on a major league team. His first attempt ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and it is years before another chance comes. By that time he is not far off the age at which most first-class players retire. In a few short seasons, or never, he must make the towering reputation that he feels is his right. His brief career is both comic and tragic, and ends before he has proved what his stature might have been.
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.
Many of Malamud's characters are Jewish (the title story, for example, is about a rabbinical student trying to find a wife through a very peculiar marriage broker) but through his gentle and haunting exploration of their predicaments he illuminates a region that is common to every man's world.
Collections of interviews with notable modern writers
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