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The Magic Barrel

Stories

Bernard Malamud; Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374525862
ISBN13: 9780374525866

Trade Paperback

240 Pages

$19.00

CA$26.00

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Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1958. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, Arthur Fidelman, searches the ruins of old Europe for his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of Chagallesque artistic magic.

As Jhump Lahiri remarks in her introduction, "What Malamud locates about the immigrant experience—a sense of loss, of struggle, of wanting we cannot have—constitutes the nuts and bolts of dramatic fiction." The Magic Barrel is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

Reviews

Praise for The Magic Barrel

"Funny and tragic and true to humanity."—Charles Poore, The New York Times

"In the short story, Malamud achieved an almost psalmlike compression. He has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as well be thought a Jewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and noctures."—Mark Shechner, Partisan Review

"There are thirteen stories in The Magic Barrel and every one of them is a small, highly individualized work of art. This is the kind of book that calls for not admiration but gratitude."—Richard Sullivan, Chicago Tribune

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

The Magic Barrel

THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS
Feld, the shoemaker, was annoyed that his helper, Sobel, was so insensitive to his reverie that he wouldn't for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench. He gave him a...