The Collected works of Bernard Malamud Series

William Dublin is middle-aged, a distinguished biographer seeking increased accomplishment and the key to his inner feelings. His marriage is stable if unexciting, and he lives comfortably with his wife in Vermont. Then his imagination is caught by Fanny, a young girl of twenty-three, and he is thrown into an intense, erotic love affair that threatens to destroy his measured, disciplined world and the lives of those around him.

The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

Published December 1959

Frank Alpine, a drifter fleeing from his past, runs straight into struggling Brooklyn grocer Morris Bober. Seeing a chance to atone for past sins, Frank becomes Bober's assistant and keeps shop when the owner takes ill. But it is Bober's daughter, Helen, who gives Frank a real reason to stay around, even as he begins to steal from the store.

Widely considered as one of the great American-Jewish novels, The Assistant is a classic look at the social and racial divides of a country still in its infancy, and a stunning evocation of the immigrant experience - of cramped circumstances and great expectations.

Pictures of Fidelman

by Bernard Malamud

Published October 1969

Arthur Fidelman, Bronx-born and raised, is a self-confessed failure as a painter. When he goes to Italy to prepare a critical study of Giotto, a picaresque tale of comedy and adventure ensues. Pursued through the streets of Rome by the refugee Susskind, falling into the hands of art thieves, hand-carving wooden Madonnas, becoming a pimp, attempting to sculpt the perfect hole, Fidelman is a comic creation of genius.

The Magic Barrel

by Bernard Malamud

Published December 1960

In this collection of stories Malamud displays his great gifts as a writer - his humour, his profound concern for all human life and his ability to transmute common things and people into a strange poetry. Many of his characters are Jewish (the title story, for example, is about a rabbinical student trying to find a wife through a very peculiar marriage broker) but through his gentle and haunting exploration of their predicaments he illuminates a region that is common to every man's world.

The Fixer

by Bernard Malamud

Published April 1967

Kiev, in the years before World War I, is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. When a 12-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death, his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is made against the Jews. Yokov Bok, a carpenter, is blamed, arrested and imprisoned without indictment.

Rembrandt's Hat

by Bernard Malamud

Published 27 September 1973

The Natural

by Bernard Malamud

Published December 1963

This is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.

Idiots First

by Bernard Malamud

Published July 1969

Bernard Malamud, renowned as a novelist, was also highly acclaimed as a writer of short stories. He himself wrote: 'Short stories, perhaps better than other forms of fiction, point up the haste and heaviness of the odds against us, and our million daily miraculous escapes from the worst of fates and the best of insights.' The magic in Malamud's stories is once again evident in Idiots First, both in the strange fantasy of a story like 'The Jewbird' or the title story 'Idiots First' and in the deeply moving realism of 'The German Refugee'. It is in the wit and comic gusto of 'Still Life' and in the strangeness of 'Naked Nude'.

A New Life

by Bernard Malamud

Published December 1962