Most Popular Books by 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.

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

Story of a baseball player''s record-shattering career.

Frank, a troubled, somewhat desperate, Italian American, works long hours in the grocery store of a struggling Jewish family in a Brooklyn neighborhood where he develops a secret passion for his employer''s attractive daughter.

Bernard Malamud, author of such acclaimed novels as The Fixer and The Natural and winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, is widely recognized as one of the most important and enduring of American writers. Yet because he was intensely private about the way he worked, few readers are aware of his extraordinarily prolific expression of his commitment to the writing process. Including a wealth of never-before-published material, Talking Horse is designed to provide writers with insights into the way a master thought about and practiced his craft. This unique collection includes speeches, interviews, lesson plans, essays, and a series of previously unpublished notes on the nature of fiction, all of which offer an unparalleled look at the writing life. Each section of the book includes a headnote by Nicholas Delbanco or Alan Cheuse.

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.

In his later middle age, prize-winning biographer William Dubin''s obsession for biography is supplanted by the obsession of love for a woman half is age, who has sought an understanding of her life through his books.

A novel for secondary school English classes with great writing and important themes.

"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.