The Magic Barrel

Name: The Magic Barrel
Author: Bernard Malamud
ISBN: 9781466805514

Bernard Malamud

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The Magic Barrel

Bernard Malamud

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The Magic Barrel won the National Book Award. Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, 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. The stories tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and literary inventiveness. A high point in the history of the modern American short story, The Magic Barrel is a fiction collection which, at its heart, is about the immigrant experience. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

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