The Magic Barrel

Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award: “Every one of [the stories] is a small, highly individualized work of art.” —The Chicago Tribune With an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake Bernard Malamud’s first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy, where Malamud’s alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony. The stories tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and literary inventiveness. A high point in the history of the modern American short story, The Magic Barrel is a fiction collection which, at its heart, is about the immigrant experience. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry. “Malamud possesses a gift for characterization that is often breathtaking. . . .[His] fiction bubbles with life.” —New York Times “[Malamud] has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as well be thought a Jewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and noctures.” —Partisan Review