Conversations with Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud gave his first interview in 1958, his last in 1986. During the intervening twenty-eight years he was formally interviewed at least forty times. This book collects twenty-eight of the best interviews, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to more extended and leisurely conversations with academics and writers.

Winner of two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, this universally praised author of The Magic Barrel, The Fixer, The Natural, and many stories that are acclaimed among the masterpieces of American fiction appears in these interviews quite appropriately as an artist devoted more to his work than to discussing it. This collection includes interviews in which Malamud gives a commentary on each of his novels and on many of his short stories. What emerges from these encounters with this great author is a sense of Malamud's deep, lifetime commitment to his art and to a seriousness of purpose.

Though there is very little domestic detail or literary gossip in Malamud's conversations, these interviews reveal the essence of a great writer that the multitudes of readers inspired by his books crave to find and retain.

This book contains twenty-eight interviews with Bernard Malamud, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to extended conversations with adademics and writers. The interviews were conducted between 1958 and 1986.

Concerned with many of the moral and spiritual questions at the heart of the Jewish-American experience, Bernard Malamud brought to his fiction the need to ask serious questions in the guise of compelling, page-turning stories. In stories set in America, Europe and Russia, Malamud s characters speak in a rich, provocative language that captures the ear and shows a master eavesdropper at work.