Bernard Malamud's Short Stories Reading Order

Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel (1958) is the story collection that won the National Book Award and established Malamud as one of the major American writers of his generation — thirteen stories including 'The Magic Barrel,' 'Idiots First,' 'The Last Mohican,' 'A Summer's Reading,' and 'Take Pity,' among others. Malamud published The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957) as novels before The Magic Barrel appeared; he would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and a second National Book Award for The Fixer (1966). The Magic Barrel represents Malamud's short fiction in its most fully realized form — realistic Brooklyn and Eastern European settings, dark comedy, moral seriousness, and moments of grace that define his particular version of Jewish-American writing. There are no direct sequels to the stories, but Idiots First (1963), his second collection, continues in the same vein.