The Tenants.

MALAMUD, Bernard.

$450.00

Item Number: 112806

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

First edition of Malamud’s sixth novel. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to his cousins, “For Minnie and Marshall With affection Bern.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. Jacket photograph by Janna Malamud.

Malamud began the initial composition of the novel in 1969 and completed it in 1971. Its plot concerns a rivalry between two writers—one of them a Jew and the other an African-American— who are the last two persons remaining in a soon to be condemned apartment building. Before Malamud began writing this novel, he'd already "published two short stories treating relationships between blacks and Jews": "Angel Levine" (1955) and "Black Is My Favorite Color" (1963). And in at least one other story, "The Mourners" (1955), he had examined the fraught relationship between a tenant and a landlord. After he'd completed the novel, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction."