The Tenants

First published in 1971, The Tenants is a ruthlessly funny dissection of a relationship of profound unease and mutual destruction.

In Malamud we may indeed salute a new American writer of power and originality. He has a wonderful sense of character and atmosphere

One of the best writers in the English language-His work embeds itself in one's consciousness and refuses to be dislodged

Bernard Malamud, one of America's most important novelists and short-story writers, was born in Brooklyn in 1914. He took his B.A. degree at the City College of New York and his M.A. at Colombia University. From 1940 to 1949 he taught in various New York schools, and then joined the staff of Oregon State University, where he stayed until 1961. Thereafter, he taught at Bennington State College, Vermont. 
 
His remarkable, and uncharacteristic first novel, The Natural, appeared in 1952. Malamud received international acclaim with the publication of The Assistant (1957, winner of the Rosenthal Award and the Daroff Memorial Award). His other works include The Magic Barrel (1958, winner of the National Book Award), Idiots First (1963, short stories), The Fixer (1966, winner of a second National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), The Tenants (1971), Rembrandt's Hat (1973, short stories), Dubin's Lives (1979) and God's Grace (1982). Bernard Malamud was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, USA, in 1964, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and won a major Italian award, the Premio Mondello, in 1985. Benard Malamud died in 1986.

The last remaining tenant in a condemned New York tenement, Harry Lesser struggles against rising panic and escalating odds to complete the novel he started ten years earlier. Then he stumbles on a black man, sitting typing in one of the deserted flats: Willie Spearmint, soul writer. Touchy, hostile and anti-semitic, demanding then denouncing Lesser's critical help with his floridly violent tales of oppression, Spearmint is exactly what Lesser doesn't need - or does he?

Pictures Of Fidelman

Meet Arthur Fidelman: self-confessed failure, fanatic, friend, pimp, late-bloomer in love and a brilliant comic creation

A delightful piece of work, and it shows a major artist's mastery of his medium... Fidelman is a superb picaresque hero, and the novel is always entertaining, often hilariously so

The accent of a hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud's words.  He is a rich original of the first rank.

In Mr Malamud we may indeed salute a new American writer of power and originality.  He has a wonderful sense of character and atmosphere

One of the best writers in the English language... His work embeds itself in one's consciousness and refuses to be dislodged

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

'The experience of reading The Magic Barrel was akin to a rite of initiation... The stories settled swiftly and deeply into my consciousness; now that I have read them, I cannot believe there was ever a time I had not' Jhumpa Lahiri

No crude summary can convey the subtleties of these stories, in which the paradox of guilt and happiness, the irony of good intentions and all human struggles against suffering are suggested sometimes by a single poetic image, a juxtaposition of gross trivialities with romantic and mystical thoughts... He is not only an original but a passionately honest writer

His is a master of an alchemy whereby the grossest reality is converted to the most imaginative uses. He transcribes everyday life and yet the result glows with lights never seen on land or sea.

There are thirteen stoires 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

Is he 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.

A chance encounter that thrilled me as much as any book this year. Great writing in capsule form, Malamud's Magic Barrel is a bran tub of delights

A matchmaker finds love for a would-be rabbi; a shopkeeper dies because he cannot afford a doctor; a little girl steals candy; an angel visits a grieving tailor. Through Malamud's great gifts as a writer - humour and profound concern for the matter of human life - he transmutes the particular struggles of everyday sufferers into a strange poetry.

The Natural

A baseball player struggling with a god-given gift and human passions is given a second chance to become what he always dreamed he could be: the best there ever was.

One of the best writers in the English language... His work embeds itself into one's consciousness and refuses to be dislodged

The Natural by Bernard Malamud shows the agony, destruction and pathos that come often with great sports talent

This book established that we could have a serious adult baseball novel by playing with the parallels between mythical elements in the game and mythical elements in literature

Bernard Malamud's The Natural that still leads the field [for novels about baseball]. It is one of the landmarks of a period in US fiction when Jewish novelists dominated the scene with work of the highest ambition

An unusually fine novel... In his telling and always deliberate use of the vernacular alternated with passages evocative and almost lyrical, in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture which elaborated it, Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual book

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.

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud has one of the greatest of a novelist's gifts. One believes everything he says...Dubin's Lives is another of his unaffected successes

Masterly and hypnotic...I can't recall a more tender portrait of a marriage, or a more beautifully incisive, exact and well-judged chronicle of the longings - not just, but chiefly, erotic - that can owrry away at such a bond

A rich book, generous in what it offers, a work that significantly extends the range of one of America's finest writers

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.

Bernard Malamud

Praise for Dubin's Lives

Bernard Malamud has one of the greatest of a novelist's gifts. One believes everything he says...Dubin's Lives is another of his unaffected successes

Masterly and hypnotic...I can't recall a more tender portrait of a marriage, or a more beautifully incisive, exact and well-judged chronicle of the longings - not just, but chiefly, erotic - that can owrry away at s ...

A rich book, generous in what it offers, a work that significantly extends the range of one of America's finest writers

Bernard Malamud has one of the greatest of a novelist's gifts. One believes everything he says...Dubin's Lives is another of his unaffected successes

Masterly and hypnotic...I can't recall a more tender portrait of a marriage, or a more beautifully incisive, exact and well-judged chronicle of the longings - not just, but chiefly, erotic - that can owrry away at s ...

A rich book, generous in what it offers, a work that significantly extends the range of one of America's finest writers

Bernard Malamud has one of the greatest of a novelist's gifts. One believes everything he says...Dubin's Lives is another of his unaffected successes

Masterly and hypnotic...I can't recall a more tender portrait of a marriage, or a more beautifully incisive, exact and well-judged chronicle of the longings - not just, but chiefly, erotic - that can owrry away at s ...

A rich book, generous in what it offers, a work that significantly extends the range of one of America's finest writers

Books by Bernard Malamud

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter