A struggling neighborhood Jewish grocer takes on a helper who falls in love with his daughter and steals from his store.

Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and coming of age in Depression-era New York, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) began his career writing stories of unsparing precision and power, plumbing the depths of an impoverished urban world. His early, naturalistic style evolved into an inventive, often surreal idiom that blurs reality and fantasy. His first novel, The Natural (1952), is a dazzling reimagining of the possibilities of sports fiction,...

A collection of short stories by the twentieth century American author.

Nothing was going to stop Roy Hobbs from fulfilling his boyhood dream of baseball stardom. As a 14-year old he fashions a baseball bat from an oak tree. He soon impresses major league scouts with his ability. His talent also catches the eye of a sportswriter who eventually becomes instrumental in Hobbs' career. The appearance of a mysterious woman, however, shatters his dream. Years later Hobbs reappears as a rookie for the New York Knights and has...

This extraordinary collection is the first to present the unprecedented range of American Jewish fiction today, from the acclaimed immigrant and post-immigrant masters such as Singer, Bellow, Roth, Ozick, Malamud, and Paley to the new voices of post-acculturation like those of Mark Helprin, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Daphne Merkin, Allegra Goodman, and Adam Schwartz. Writing Our Way Home limns the dramatic transformation of Jewish life in the past three...

Famous writers' first works. Forty-one stories in all, some showing obvious promise, some so bad you wonder how they made it into print. An inspiration for would-be authors everywhere.

"In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared -- if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity -- could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that,...

"Literary Brooklyn" uncovers the borough's--and a nation's-- history through the minds of its greatest writers. It's a prismatic investigation into a place as diverse and intriguing as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.