The late novels and stories of America's greatest myth-maker and
chronicler of the Jewish American experience
"Is Malamud 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
"[A] short-story writer who is better than any of them, including
myself." **--Flannery O'Connor
**
The long-awaited third and final volume of Library of America's edition
of Bernard Malamud's writings brings together three novels and thirteen
stories of the 1970s and 80s that reaffirm his place in the American
pantheon.
The Tenants (1971) chronicles the growing tensions between two
male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants
of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house.
Dubin's Lives (1976) is a fascinating portrait of a middle-aged
biographer who becomes involved with a woman half his age while
researching a life of D.H. Lawrence--an affair that unsettles things in
expected and unexpected ways.
God's Grace (1982) is a wildly inventive, darkly humorous
postapocalyptic novel whose cast includes the lone human survivor of the
Day of Devastation, a group of talking chimps, and other (speechless)
primates--who try to establish a New Covenant with God.
The stories in this volume confirm Malamud as a master storyteller, from
the Kafkaesque unbridled fantasy of "Talking Horse" to the final
"fictive biographies" of "In Kew Gardens," about Virginia Woolf, and
"Alma Redeemed," about the Austrian composer Alma Mahler. Rounding out
the volume are "Long Work, Short Life," Malamud's hard-to-find "casual
memoir" about his writing life, and the previously unpublished "A Lost
Bar-Mitzvah," a poignant sketch of Malamud's own childhood. This deluxe
edition includes a chronology of Malamud's life and career and detailed
notes by Malamud biographer Philip Davis.
