Book details

The Natural

A Novel

FSG Classics

Author: Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Kevin Baker

The Natural

The Natural

$18.00

About This Book

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition

Introduction by Kevin Baker

The...

Page Count
256
On Sale
07/07/2003

Book Details

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition

Introduction by Kevin Baker

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball.

In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9780374502003

Reading Guide

In The News

“A brilliant and unusually fine novel.” —The New York Times

“A preposterously readable story about life.” —Time

“Malamud [holds a] high and honored place among contemporary American writers.” —Washington Post Book World

“The finest novel about baseball since Ring Lardner left the scene.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About the Creators

The Natural

The Natural

$18.00