[None of Bernard Malamud's] longer fictions has the absolute rightness of tone and invention of his best short stories [collected in The Stories of Bernard Malamud].

His real gift is for the short story, for the spare, rigorous etching of solitary figures caught in the stress of adversity. When Malamud translates such figures into the novel, whose ampler dimensions lead us to expect development, he has difficulty in making his personages go anywhere except deeper into disaster. The plots of his novels tend to devolve into extended fantasies—sometimes lurid, sometimes just depressing—of mutilation and interment. By contrast, his stronger stories exhibit exquisite artistic tact, a remarkable intuition for saying a great deal with the most minimal narrative gestures, and a delicacy of feeling about the characters that cannot be reduced to any simple technique. (p. 1)

[The typical protagonist]—the isolate pensioner as everyman—is more often...