Böcker av Bernard Malamud

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.