In the following essay, Brown explores Malamud's “radical dissent from contemporary despair” in “The First Seven Years.”

In the following essay, Alter examines the “democratic dilemma” in Malamud's fiction.

In the following essay, Benson argues that Malamud is a traditional American writer.

In the following essay, Lauricella considers The Natural as a composite of novel and romance with a “failed hero.”

In the following essay, Bilik explores the ways in which Malamud diverges from the conventions of the majority of post-Holocaust Jewish fiction.

In the following essay, Alter explores differences in Malamud's interpretation of historical significance in The Fixer, which Alter categorizes as a novel of “Jewish historicism,” and The Tenants, which he calls a “work of a disillusioned American idealist.”

In the following essay, Aarons explores elements of Jewish ethics of compassion in Malamud's short stories.

In the following essay, Abramson discusses major themes and motifs in The Assistant, particularly asceticism and imprisonment, and the contrast between Judaic ethics and American materialism.

In the following essay, Baris discusses the ways in which “The Mourners” highlights collective responsibility in the plight of others.

In the following essay, Buchen explores the relationship in Pictures of Fidelman between life as an artist and the protagonist's final embrace of bisexuality.

In the following essay, Mellard argues that A New Life is both an academic novel and a pastoral.

In the following essay, Pifer discusses Malamud's use of artificial, highly stylized narrative devices in The Natural.

In the following essay, Malin suggests autobiographical elements in Pictures of Fidelman that allow Malamud to explore his role as an artist.

In the following essay, Briganti contends that women in Malamud's fiction generally exist only to provide the momentum or impetus for the male characters to reach self-knowledge.

In the following essay, Quart discusses Malamud's technique of keeping his female characters at a distance—both physically and emotionally—from his male characters.

In the following essay, Sant explains the significance of Malamud's use of fantasy and the surreal in his protagonist's imprisonment and eventual physical and emotional freedom.

In the following essay, Abramson addresses Malamud's treatment of the tension between Jews and African Americans in The Tenants.

In the following essay, Furman reviews the apparent disparities between Malamud's early and later fiction.

In the following interview, conducted through an exchange of letters in 1973 and originally published in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays in 1975, Malamud discusses specific aspects of his writing, divorced from any biographical influence.

Malamud best represents the phenomenon of the Jewish Movement; not only is he one of its founders and major practitioners, he is probably its best single exemplar. In Malamud's work we most clearly perceive just those characteristics which define the entire Movement. First and foremost, there is the theme of meaningful suffering, which in Malamud also implies the quest for moral resolution and self-realization. But the theme of suffering cannot alone sustain either a movement or a writer's car...

[The aspects of culture] which characterize Malamud's best writing, particularly some of his finest short stories, I would identify with Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement founded shortly before the middle of the eighteenth century by the East European saint and mystic, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov. Some of the major teachings of Hasidism, a transformation or reinterpretation of an older Jewish mysticism which made it accessible to the masses of the people, are the need to journey inward ...

No contemporary American writer has written about immigrants and survivors more frequently or more imaginatively than has Bernard Malamud. His fictional world is peopled with Diasporans of all kinds but, unlike [Abraham Cahan's assimilated protagonist in his The Rise of David Levinsky], Malamud's characters embody significant fragments of the Jewish past. Most frequently Malamud portrays remnants of the earlier generation of immigrants, unwilling refugees from American Jewish affluence, surviv...

A New Life deserves to survive on its own terms, its climate of nineteenth-century American myth and its rambling but thematically integrated nineteenth-century structure. Malamud's central archetype here is not, as some critics have insisted, the imported Fisher King of wasteland literature, but that native hybrid, the American Adam. Malamud's allusions to Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville establish Seymore Levin's basic transcendental ideal and its qualifications and revisions. Levin&#...

Writing in a parable mode that uses (to varying degrees) his own distinctive mix of realism, myth, fantasy, romance, comedy, and fairy tale, Malamud has continued to grow artistically. Always a writer willing to take risks, he has freely experimented with new themes and techniques, especially in his short stories. He has over the years developed considerable stylistic range and has often attempted to move beyond the pale of his "Jewish" humanism. These efforts are always interesting, frequentl...

Bernard Malamud is a writer who early on established an emphatic paradigm for his fictional world and who ever since has been struggling in a variety of ways to escape its confines. His latest novel [God's Grace] is his most strenuous strategem of escape, moving beyond the urban horizon of his formative work into an entirely new mode of postapocalyptic fantasy—with intriguing though somewhat problematic results. When I say "paradigm," I am not referring to the explicit Jewish the...

In Bernard Malamud's writing,… Jewishness is more of a literary device than it is a religious, historical, or sociological representation. Malamud's use of Jewish characters and subjects is metaphorical and idiosyncratic, and it must be understood within the context of his fiction without recourse to external sources and familiar assumptions; further, Malamud's metaphor of Jewishness has changed considerably since his first stories were published, and being Jewish in a recent nov...

[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 novel...

To understand Malamud, one must read closely his short stories…. Most of them portray poverty-stricken people living in New York or Brooklyn, and Malamud writes of misery with calm poignancy. (p. 218) What Malamud is always asking himself is how people live with great misery. Some of his people are crushed by it, but most survive, through hope or pride or sheer fortitude. The best, moreover, learn to be compassionate, and compassion is, for Malamud, the first of the virtues. (p. 219)

In such early work of Bernard Malamud as the tales collected in The Magic Barrel and the penitential drama of The Assistant, the painful, intractable truths of immigrant Jewish life in America exist as a permanent reproach to the younger generation of writers like Roth, and … Heller, who turned that poverty and suffering, even the Yiddish language itself, into a manic comedy of derision and cultural denial. Malamud rendered the immigrant world with such exactness and honesty that it acquired the fixe...

Bernard Malamud sometimes gets obscured by flashier American writers…. But he writes superbly most of the time, at least as well as any living American writer of fiction, and time will pardon him for violating the categories. For he does do that, and reviewers, whose categories they largely are, are often uncomfortable with him because of it. His narratives, which we are told ought to be shapely and lucid, are often lopsided and indistinct. He can be abrupt, impatient with the demands of plot without...

Bernard Malamud's risk-taking new novel ["Dubin's Lives"] moves into areas not usually associated with his art. In many of the famous short stories, in such novels as "The Assistant," "The Fixer" and "The Tenants," Malamud has depicted Jewish characters in confrontation with their neighbors—Italian-Americans, Czarist Russians, blacks and other goyim; he has presented the Jew as victim, as sufferer and as purveyor of special moral i...

At first glance, God's Grace looks like an improbable novel to come from Bernard Malamud. In fact, it is an odd book, period…. The book is clearly a version of Robinson Crusoe, updated to the age of total war. Malamud has written about talking animals before—in "The Jewbird" and "Talking Horse." But those stories, like all of Malamud's best fiction, are hard as diamonds, tight and spare rather than verbose, and with no overt moralizing. In God's...

Bernard Malamud has been a patient student of life's mysteries, a steady worker in the craft of fiction and, of course, one of our major writers, but he is hardly a novelist of large canvas or big risk. His protagonists begin their respective sufferings in medias res, generally in settings (e.g. rundown grocery stores, Czarist prisons, jerkwater colleges) that reinforce the entombing point. Not since the heyday of the Russian novel have there been such endlessly dragged-out winters, especially when h...

"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 ...

How often is it that a major contemporary novelist opens his latest book with a dialogue between God and man? Or employs for his main characters one human being and a chimp, with an assortment of gorillas and baboons for other dramatis personae? Or seeks to conceive a fable for the future—man after the nuclear "Devastation"—that is nothing less than a retelling of the Old and New Testaments, complete with the author's views on man's (and God's) nature, good a...

Sprinters do not ordinarily sign up for marathons, nor do lonely long-distance runners enter the crush of 100-yard dashes. But some authors perform an analogous feat by writing both short stories and novels. Instead of being complimented on their versatility, though, they frequently encounter a peculiar problem: facing themselves as competitors…. Under such difficult conditions, [Bernard Malamud] has been racing himself for a long time…. The Stories of Bernard Malamud includes 23 pieces select...

"As a writer, I want uncertainty. It's part of life. I want something the reader is uncertain about," Malamud said in a 1966 interview. This he has certainly achieved [in Dubin's Lives]. Though Dubin, to a large extent Kitty, and to a lesser one Fanny, are rich and appealing characters, much remains puzzling about the novel. More than any of Malamud's previous works, it is "literary," a bookish book: not only Thoreau and Lawrence are evoked, but also Keats, M...

"Man had innumerable chances but was—in the long run—insufficient to God's purpose. He was insufficient to himself." That theme is variously expressed in Bernard Malamud's extraordinary fable, "God's Grace,"… which manages the rare feat of being a post-nuclear-holocaust story both somber and sometimes very funny….