Malamud’s US centenary editions
Both Bernard Malamud’s UK and US publishers have produced new editions of his collected works to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday. Amusingly, the new Vintage Classics covers from Random House UK, which set the books’ titles in a cursive that mimics handwriting, seem to have drawn inspiration from the last set of covers produced by his American publisher, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, each of which carried an unbroken line from the illustration to form the title, hinting at the kind of unravellings the characters within would undergo. The new US editions use bold single colour background and a stylish Milton Glaser-influenced typeface whose ornate swashes and deep dropshadow evoke 1970s cover design.
Malamud’s UK centenary editions
Malamud wrote about “ordinary Jews” in extraordinary crises. Novels like The Natural, in which a baseball player faces a crisis over his abilities (which was made into a movie starring Robert Redford) and The Tenants (a story of rival writers – one Jewish and fussy, the other black, politically alert, and expansive – inhabiting a condemned apartment block), while exceptional and influential, are eclipsed by his short stories, available in several volumes in the UK and a collected edition Stateside. The best of these stories – “The Magic Barrel”, “The Jewbird” – display Malamud’s unerring ear for dialogue, his keen detailing of the immigrant experience, and an economy of plotting – alongside the occasional fantastical element – that brings them close to fables.
As well as these new editions, Bernard Malamud’s reputation is maintained by those writers who cite him as an influence: Jhumpa Lahiri and Aleksander Hemon are among those contributing new introductions to the US editions. A subtler tribute is his roman à clef-ish appearance in Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, in which character E.I. Lonoff is a transparent rendering of Malamud – a man Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, speaking for himself and his author, calls “Maestro”. C