Due to his formidable skill as a novelist--and to the fact that one of his novels, The Natural, had the good or bad luck to be repackaged as a large-screen vehicle for Robert Redford--Bernard Malamud hasn't always been recognized as short-story master of the first rank. As this collection demonstrates once and for all, he is. The anthology pieces, such as "The Magic Barrel," "The Silver Dish," or "Rembrandt's Hat," would be more than enough to place the author in the pantheon. But the 54 stories gathered here represent an astonishing abundance of narrative smarts and brilliant, Yiddish-accented prose. Malamud's heroes meet all manner of misfortune--there's something distinctly Job-like about even his most contented characters (a typical one has "a sort of indigenous sadness [that] hung on or around him")--yet the author suffuses their woes with gentle comedy. And while Jews occupy center stage in almost every tale, they are universal rather than parochial figures: as the beleaguered tailor in "Angel Levine" triumphantly informs his wife, "Believe me, there are Jews everywhere."

From Library Journal
Malamud, who died in 1986, is perhaps better known for his novels (e.g., The Natural; The Fixer) than for his short stories, though these he published abundantly in collections over the years (e.g., The Stories of Bernard Malamud, 1983). Giroux, Malamud's longtime editor, publisher, and friend, who put together this evident labor of love, quotes Flannery O'Connor on Malamud: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself." Many of these stories treat the dead-end lot of working-class Jews ("The Cost of Living") or the thwarted aspirations of the artist Fidelman in Italy ("A Pimp's Revenge"). Appearing in the order in which they were written (rather than published), the 55 stories span his first, "The Armistice" (1940), until his last experimental biography of Virginia Woolf. Displayed thus, Malamud's skill is consistently sound, effected quietly through disciplined pacing and dignified characters. Essential for libraries that lack Malamud's previous story collections.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Walter Goodman
The Complete Stories offers an excuse to old-timers to see whether the years have treated their favorites kindly and an invitation to newcomers to decide for themselves wither Malamud is worth rediscovering. And for the dedicated soul who will read straight through from the first story to the 55th, there is the opportunity to follow the development--or the zigzags--of his style, imagination and concerns, to trip over his weaknesses and be lifted up again by his strengths.

From Booklist
It is a deep pleasure to return to Malamud's work more than a decade after his death and to rediscover his magic. To read these 55 stories is to trace the evolution of one of the surest voices of the perplexing postwar era. Robert Giroux, Malamud's longtime editor, captures the essence of the man in his deft introduction, establishing a biographical context for these evocative stories. Right from the start, Malamud wrote with rock-solid authority, composing tales as morally resonant as Bible stories, as mystical as any fairy tale, and as artfully disorienting as any painting by Chagall, even when they are set in the grittiest of Bronx tenements. His sharply drawn characters are poor in comfort and rich in suffering. Bitter irony abounds; obstinacy rules; annoying strangers change the course of lives; and love is perverse and untenable. In "The Magic Barrel," for instance, a lonely rabbinical scholar retains a matchmaker only to realize his lack of faith in God. In other tales, a peddler won't rest until a cop apologizes for insulting him, and a wife berates her grocer husband nearly to death, than panics at the thought of losing him. In a luminous series of Italian stories, many involving the hapless but charming Arthur Fidelman, "a self-confessed failure as a painter," Malamud dramatizes the disorientation of American Jews abroad, the dangers of romanticism, and the waywardness of human nature, intricate subjects that continued to inspire him to the very end of his brilliant writing life. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
A generous, invaluable volume that collects the 53 stories published during his 40-year career by a master of both realism and surrealism, a writer who begins to look more and more like one of the very best modern American writers. This differs from the earlier Stories (1983) in including the total contents of such acclaimed (and award-winning) collections as The Magic Barrel, as well as several early efforts (of which the forgotten ``Armistice'' is especially impressive), and a scattering of others retrieved from the magazines in which they originally appeared. An unmistakable voice, terse and ironical while simultaneously colloquial urban-Jewish, sounds throughout these rich tales, which manage to be remarkably varied despite their emphasis on Malamud's trademark themes of victimization and loneliness. The exceptions are several sardonically amusing portrayals of the scapegrace flawed artist Arthur Fidelman, and the late, complex ``fictive biographies'' of such subjects as Virginia Woolf and Alma Mahler (``In Kew Gardens'' and ``Alma Redeemed,'' respectively) that seem to have developed out of his 1979 novel, Dublin's Lives. But the essential Malamud is found in his moving studies of the claims of charity and the consequences of acknowledging or denying one's kinship with others (``Idiots First,'' ``Take Pity''), and more specifically of Jews unable to escape their heritage and its responsibilities (``Man in the Drawer,'' ``The Last Mohican''). On another level, the imperatives of belonging are ingeniously rendered in such celebrated fantasies as ``Angel Levine,'' ``The Jewbird,'' and ``The Silver Crown,'' an overlooked story that is one of Malamud's greatest. Even readers who think they know his work well may be surprised at how powerfully some of the lesser known stories continue to resonate (``The Bill'' and the moving ``Rembrandt's Hat'' are exemplary). A landmark book that belongs on the same shelf with the collected stories of John Cheever and Issac Bashevis Singer. ``Believe me, there are Jews everywhere,'' intones a representative Malamud character. Believe me, we believe him. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
One of the best american short-story writers of this century. -Jay Cantor, the New York Times

Glittering gems that dazzle with a different splor with each turn in the light, these stories ask timeless questions even as they enchant. -Dan Cryer, Newsday


Review
One of the best american short-story writers of this century. -Jay Cantor, the New York Times

Glittering gems that dazzle with a different splor with each turn in the light, these stories ask timeless questions even as they enchant. -Dan Cryer, Newsday


Dan Cryer, Newsday
Glittering gems that dazzle with a different splendor with each turn in the light, these stories ask timeless questions even as they enchant.

Review
One of the best american short-story writers of this century. -Jay Cantor, the New York Times

Glittering gems that dazzle with a different splor with each turn in the light, these stories ask timeless questions even as they enchant. -Dan Cryer, Newsday


Book Description
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997

With an Introduction by Robert Giroux, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book," Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by readers, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together fifty-five stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.


About the Author
Acclaimed for his short stories, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) received two National Book Awards (for The Magic Barrel and the novel The Fixer) and the Pulitzer Prize (for The Fixer). A native of Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College.

ANNOTATION

New York Times Notable Book of the Year Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This volume brings together more than 50 stores written on the Jewish experience in this century—from Armistice, which Malamud wrote on the job at the U.S. Census Department in 1940, to Alma Redeemed, written in 1984, by which time Malamud was a distinguished man of letters with an array of honors, the admiration of his peers, and the acclaim of readers. In all his work, Malamud was concerned to identify and dramatize a quality he spoke of as "the human." This quality is found in the way his characters cling to hope against all reason, in their capacity for sudden deep feeling and their awareness of the world's comic indifference to their aspirations.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jay Cantor - The New York Times

Malamud [is], I think, one of the best American short story writers of this century. He reminds me, strangely enough, of the impeccable Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor, one of Bern's true colleagues (and his admirer), for they share the sense that eternities always focus down to this moment, this choice: will one do justice to those close to us, here, now?

Publishers Weekly

From 1940 (when he published 'Armistice,' the story of a Brooklyn grocer's reaction to the fall of Paris) until the last of his experimental 'fictive biographies,' published in 1984, Malamud (The Natural; The Fixer) created hundreds of characters who were ordinary people involved in impossible situations. Malamud began as a dialect writer -- one of the first to explain to the affluent, assimilated children and grandchildren of the second great wave of Jewish migration what they had left, or failed to leave, behind in the shtetls of Europe and New York. Himself the son of a late-night grocer, Malamud gave us what may be literature's first convenience stores; and, in his prose and dialogue, he captured with loving grace the dying rhythms and flourishes natural to Yiddish. In later stories, he came into his true subject, the cult of art under the pressures of late modernism: some of his best (and funniest) tales chronicle the Italian wanderings of Arthur Fidelman, failed painter, hopeless lover and mythically misadventurous schlemiel, as he bounces from city to city, getting kidnapped, buggered, robbed, killed, revived, seduced and, perpetually, haunted by the masterworks of the past. Like his humble hero, Malamud kept at his art, sometimes writing in step with the vanguard and at others spitting into the wind of fashion. As these 55 stories show, he was at every stage of his life an exciting storyteller from sentence to sentence, even word to word. None of his many imitators has matched his instinct for the perfectly appropriate, if seemingly offhand, surprise. Already revered for his novels and a few anthology pieces, Malamud should win a new generation of readers with this wonderful, posthumous collection.

Library Journal - Amy Boaz - Library Journal

Malamud, who died in 1986, is perhaps better known for his novels (The Natural; The Fixer) than for his short stories, though these he published abundantly in collections over the years (e.g., The Stories of Bernard Malamud). Giroux, Malamud's longtime editor, publisher, and friend, who put together this evident labor of love, quotes Flannery O'Connor on Malamud: 'I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.' Many of these stories treat the dead-end lot of working-class Jews ('The Cost of Living') or the thwarted aspirations of the artist Fidelman in Italy ('A Pimp's Revenge'). Appearing in the order in which they were written (rather than published), the 55 stories span his first, 'The Armistice' (1940), until his last experimental biography of Virginia Woolf. Displayed thus, Malamud's skill is consistently sound, effected quietly through disciplined pacing and dignified characters.

Library Journal - Amy Boaz - Library Journal

Malamud, who died in 1986, is perhaps better known for his novels (The Natural; The Fixer) than for his short stories, though these he published abundantly in collections over the years (e.g., The Stories of Bernard Malamud). Giroux, Malamud's longtime editor, publisher, and friend, who put together this evident labor of love, quotes Flannery O'Connor on Malamud: 'I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.' Many of these stories treat the dead-end lot of working-class Jews ('The Cost of Living') or the thwarted aspirations of the artist Fidelman in Italy ('A Pimp's Revenge'). Appearing in the order in which they were written (rather than published), the 55 stories span his first, 'The Armistice' (1940), until his last experimental biography of Virginia Woolf. Displayed thus, Malamud's skill is consistently sound, effected quietly through disciplined pacing and dignified characters.

Dan Cryer - Newsday

Glittering gems that dazzle with a different splendor with each turn in the light, these stories ask timeless questions even as they enchant.Read all 14 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"Art lives on surprise," Bernard Malamud once said. "A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading." Over the years, Bernard Malamud has provided surprise and more: brief tragedies laced with wit and irony, full-length portraits of our inhuman condition, novels and stories, explore the￯﾿ﾽmiraculous resurrection of the human spirit. — (John L'Heureux)