Bernard Malamud's Short Stories

About Malamud Stories

Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel (1958) is his first and most celebrated story collection — thirteen stories including 'The Magic Barrel,' 'The Last Mohican,' and 'Idiots First,' which won the National Book Award. Malamud published a second collection, Idiots First (1963), continuing the same Brooklyn and Eastern European worlds. His short fiction represents one of the three major modes of postwar Jewish-American writing, alongside Bellow and Roth — distinguished by moral allegory, dark comedy, and the schlemiel tradition inherited from Yiddish literature. The Magic Barrel and The Assistant are Malamud's most celebrated works.