The Magic Barrel.

MALAMUD, Bernard.

$975.00

Item Number: 111744

New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958.

First edition of Malamud’s first collection of short stories, which went on to win the National Book Award. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Marshall and Min Everything good- Bernie.” Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Milton Glaser. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

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); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic. "In the short story, Malamud achieved an almost psalmlike compression. He has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as well be thought a Jewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and noctures" (Mark Shechner, Partisan Review).