<div>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 life" as well as the work. Six pictures of Fidelman comprise an exhibition.</div>

Pictures of Fidelman

<div>Winner of the National Book Award: “Every one of [the stories] is a small, highly individualized work of art.” —The Chicago Tribune With an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake 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 struggling New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony. The stories tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and literary inventiveness. A high point in the history of the modern American short story, The Magic Barrel is a fiction collection which, at its heart, is about the immigrant experience. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry. “Malamud possesses a gift for characterization that is often breathtaking. . . .[His] fiction bubbles with life.” —New York Times “[Malamud] has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as well be thought a Jewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and noctures.” —Partisan Review</div>

The Magic Barrel

<div>A Brooklyn grocer’s life is turned upside down by an enigmatic assistant in this celebrated novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fixer. 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 to be timelessly vital. A National Book Award Finalist</div>

The Assistant

<div>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.</div>

The Tenants

<div>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. "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</div>

God's Grace

<div>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.</div>

Bernard Malamud
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Books By Bernard Malamud (6 Books)

Pictures of Fidelman

The Magic Barrel

The Assistant

The Tenants

God's Grace

The Stories of Bernard Malamud

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Books By Bernard Malamud (6 Books)

Pictures of Fidelman

The Magic Barrel

The Assistant

The Tenants

God's Grace

The Stories of Bernard Malamud

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