Recommendations
Books Like The Magic Barrel
Best books to read after The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel is the National Book Award–winning story collection — 'The Magic Barrel,' 'The Last Mohican,' 'For Esmé,' thirteen stories of Brooklyn and Eastern Europe. These recommendations share its Jewish-American milieu, its dark comedy and moral seriousness, or its place in the short story tradition.
- 1Buy
Idiots First
by Bernard Malamud
The direct companion — Malamud's second story collection, twelve more stories continuing the Brooklyn and Eastern European worlds of The Magic Barrel, including the magnificent title story.
- 2Buy
The Assistant
by Bernard Malamud
The companion novel — Morris Bober and Frank Alpine in the Brooklyn grocery, the moral world of The Magic Barrel in its fullest novelistic form.
- 3Buy
Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
The contemporary American story collection — 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'For Esmé,' the parallel world of Jewish-inflected New York fiction from the same mid-century moment.
- 4Buy
The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
The other great mid-century American story collection — O'Connor's Georgia grotesques share Malamud's dark comedy and moments of grace, though in a Catholic Southern rather than Jewish-American register.
- 5Buy
Dubliners
by James Joyce
The foundational modern story collection — Joyce's Dublin epiphanies as the formal ancestor of Malamud's Brooklyn moments of grace, the technical model for what The Magic Barrel achieves.
- 6Buy
The Fixer
by Bernard Malamud
The Pulitzer and National Book Award winner — Yakov Bok in tsarist Russia, Malamud's most political and extended work, the essential companion to The Magic Barrel's moral world.
- 7Buy
Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
Roth's debut — Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin, the Jewish-American story collection in its more satirical mode, the companion to Malamud's more earnest approach to the same world.
- 8Buy
The Collected Stories
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Yiddish stories Singer collected in 1982 — the direct predecessor tradition, Singer's Polish shtetl world in Yiddish, the source culture Malamud's Brooklyn fiction inherits.
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