Back Novels and Stories of the 1970s & 80s

Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1970s & 80s

The Tenants | Dubin’s Lives | God’s Grace | 13 stories | other writings More

Edited by Philip Davis

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Bernard Malamud, “The Silver Crown”
April 26, 2023

Save $35 when you purchase all three volumes of the Bernard Malamud edition.

One of America’s great mythmakers, a storyteller who ranks with Flannery O’Connor as an unfolder of the mysteries of human character, Bernard Malamud is a writer of profound sympathy, intensity, and emotional truth. This third and final volume of Library of America’s Malamud edition brings together three novels and thirteen stories from the culminating phase of his extraordinary career.

Malamud returns to his native New York in The Tenants (1971), a fable-like novel about the growing rivalry between two writers—one Jewish, the other Black—who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house, each struggling to make art in the face of animosity and bitterness. “It was Malamud’s gift to pave a hardened city with metaphysical streets so that one feels both disembodied and rooted while reading him,” Jonathan Rosen has written. “His city, at once familiar, is still a place of surprises, of trials and of ultimate meaning.”

“If you know Dubin’s Lives,” Malamud once remarked, “you know me.” This 1979 novel, the most autobiographical of his major works, recounts the sexual misadventures and literary aspirations of William B. Dubin, a troubled middle-aged writer researching a life of D. H. Lawrence who becomes involved with a woman half his age. As the lines between biographer and subject blur, Malamud reflects, with wry humor and deep feeling, on how we are strangers even to ourselves.

God’s Grace (1982), Malamud’s last completed novel, is an inventive, darkly humorous tale set in a time after nuclear holocaust and a Second Flood. Finding himself shipwrecked on a remote island, Calvin Cohn, the lone human survivor of the Day of Devastation, attempts to establish a New Covenant with God—with the aid of a troop of talking chimps, several baboons, and a formidable yarmulke-wearing gorilla.

The stories in this volume demonstrate Malamud’s unparalleled mastery of the form, from the unbridled Kafkaesque fantasy of “Talking Horse” to the fictive biographies of “In Kew Gardens,” about Virginia Woolf, and “Alma Redeemed,” about Alma Mahler. Rounding out the volume are “Long Work, Short Life,” Malamud’s hard-to-find memoir of his writing life, and the previously unpublished “A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” a poignant autobiographical story of the young Malamud’s growing anxieties about his parents’ lack of planning for his Bar-Mitzvah ceremony.

Philip Davis, editor, is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool, where he was Director of the Centre for Research, Literature and Society. He is the author of the definitive biography, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by Arlene Heyman, in honor of Phil Davis and in memory of Bernard Malamud and Shepard Kantor.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

The Tenants

Dubin’s Lives

God’s Grace

Thirteen Stories
God’s Wrath
Talking Horse
The Letter
The Silver Crown
Notes from a Lady at a Dinner Party
In Retirement
Rembrandt’s Hat
A Wig
The Model
A Lost Grave
Zora’s Noise
In Kew Gardens
Alma Redeemed

Other Writings
Introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud
Long Work, Short Life
A Lost Bar-Mitzvah

32.00 List Price: $45.00 (Save: 29%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #203820

ISBN: 978-1-59853-745-1 910 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 367 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 LOA N°300

The Novels & Stories of Bernard Malamud (three volumes)

Saul Bellow: Novels 1984–2000 LOA N°260

Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories (boxed set)

The Complete Novels of Philip Roth (nine volumes)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1970s & 80s

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.