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Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1960s

A New Life | The Fixer | Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition | ten stories More

Edited by Philip Davis

“The voice was unlike any other, haunted by whispers of Hawthorne, Babel, Isak Dinesen, even Poe, and at the same time uniquely possessed: a fingerprint of fire and ash.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

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Table of Contents

Overview

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

“Read now,” Philip Roth has observed, “you see that Bernard Malamud has more than a little in common with Beckett—the eerie clowning, the magic barrel of unadorned prose, the haunting melancholy of stories about ‘things you can’t get past.’ For me, as a young writer of the next generation starting out in the 1950s—and trying to lay claim to my own Jewish material—his fiction, along with Saul Bellow’s, meant the world.” With this second volume, The Library of America continues a three-volume edition celebrating the distinctive genius of one of postwar America’s most important and original writers.

In 1949, Bernard Malamud accepted a teaching position at Oregon State University and moved from his native New York City to the Pacific Northwest. His experience over the following decade deeply informed the writing of A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel that takes aim at the insularity, backbiting, and intellectual pettiness of academia. At its center is Seymour Levin, a naive idealist whose initiation into the ivory tower leads to his entanglement in a departmental power struggle and an emotionally wrenching affair with a colleague’s wife. By turns comic and lyrical, A New Life “may still be undervalued,” writes Jonathan Lethem, “as Malamud’s funniest and most embracing novel.”

The Fixer (1966) marked a turn for Malamud into the realm of historical fiction. Set during the twilight years of czarist Russia, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman who leaves his village to find work in Kiev, only to be arrested and charged with the murder of a twelve-year-old boy, purportedly for use in a Jewish ritual. A dramatization of the infamous blood-libel accusations unleashed against Jews over centuries of European history, Malamud’s novel is also an exploration of one man’s transformation under the extreme duress of imprisonment. Malamud won his second National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer in 1967.

The picaresque novel Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) is one of Malamud’s most exuberant creations: a series of tales about a self-described failed artist adrift in Italy. More freewheeling than much of Malamud’s other fiction, the collection shows a playfulness and a willingness to experiment that accords with the restlessness and curiosity of its hero. The ten stories from the 1960s gathered in this volume show Malamud at the height of his powers as a storyteller. Among them are the hallucinatory comedy of “The Jewbird” and the pathos of “The German Refugee” and the long story “Man in the Drawer.” As the novelist Robert Stone has said of the stories: “Like Chekhov’s, [they] are edifying in their tragic sense and delightful in their comedy, which seems to be the most we can ask of fiction.”

Philip Davis, editor, is the author of the definitive biography Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (2007). He is the editor of The Reader magazine and Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems at the University of Liverpool.

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.

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

A New Life

The Fixer
Source of The Fixer

Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition
Last Mohican
Still Life
Naked Nude
A Pimp’s Revenge
Pictures of the Artist
Glass Blower of Venice

Ten Stories
Idiots First
Suppose a Wedding (A Scene of a Play)
The Jewbird
Life Is Better than Death
Black Is My Favorite Color
The German Refugee
A Choice of Profession
Man in the Drawer
My Son the Murderer
An Exorcism

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-293-7 916 pages

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N° 249 Library of America Series

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