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A Malamud Reader
A collection of short stories and excerpts from novels including The Fixer and A New Life
- GenresFiction
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
3 people are currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Bernard Malamud
157 books478 followersBernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer (also filmed), about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 8, 2014
It started with the short stories and was hooked. I'm reading my bookshelves and sharing with Better World Books everything that doesn't catch and hold my attention for twenty pages. Malamud hooked me with a title: Black is My Favorite Color. I had forgotten how much I enjoy a good Jewish turn of phrase.
After the short stories, I read The Assistant. More good Jewish vernacular with the addition of tortured souls. So much suffering in this novella.
Section three, In Love and Prison, introduced me to Seymour Levin and sexually hot writing without explicit, graphic sex scenes. Mercy! Yakov Bok in Prison showed me a dispirited man, full of self-loathing. I was ready to feel pity for him, wrongly imprisoned for a crime he claims he did not commit. I met Yakov again in Three Journeys in the excerpt from The Fixer titled To Kiev. I read this short with the present situation in Ukraine in mind. After reading this, I no longer felt pity for Yakov. Quite the opposite, he repulsed me and I could understand why he'd been imprisoned: he probably affected the people he met the same way.
I'll be looking for more of Malamud's writing. This book is a keeper that will not be going back to BWB.
An outstandingly good read.
After the short stories, I read The Assistant. More good Jewish vernacular with the addition of tortured souls. So much suffering in this novella.
Section three, In Love and Prison, introduced me to Seymour Levin and sexually hot writing without explicit, graphic sex scenes. Mercy! Yakov Bok in Prison showed me a dispirited man, full of self-loathing. I was ready to feel pity for him, wrongly imprisoned for a crime he claims he did not commit. I met Yakov again in Three Journeys in the excerpt from The Fixer titled To Kiev. I read this short with the present situation in Ukraine in mind. After reading this, I no longer felt pity for Yakov. Quite the opposite, he repulsed me and I could understand why he'd been imprisoned: he probably affected the people he met the same way.
I'll be looking for more of Malamud's writing. This book is a keeper that will not be going back to BWB.
An outstandingly good read.
August 28, 2016
I read all the short stories from this one, but not the selections from novels, as I planned to eventually read them.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews