"Art lives on surprise," Bernard Malamud once said. "A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading." Over the years Malamud has provided surprise, and more: brief tragedies laced with wit and irony, full-length portraits of our inhuman condition, novels and stories that explore the longings, frustrations, failures, defeats, and—sometimes—the miraculous resurrection of the human spirit….

What immediately strikes the reader [about The Stories of Bernard Malamud] is how quickly and completely Malamud compels our belief in the reality of his fictional world, even when that world includes angels, a talking horse, a magic crown. We believe even his ghetto Jews—who seem to inhabit a time and place solely of Malamud's contriving—because, with his deft prose, his flat and funny dialogue, his absolute authority as storyteller, he makes us believe. These are odd, taut, tortured stories, and not all of them work—"Take...