Bernard Malamud has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 19 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is The Natural.
The Natural
Summary
Introduction by Kevin Baker The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first - and some would say still the best - novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material - the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era - and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which - now that he has done it! - looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."
©1980 Bernard Malamud (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
The Fixer
Summary
The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel - one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev and, after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.
©1966 Bernard Malamud, renewed 1994 by Ann D. Malamud (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The Tenants
Summary
With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon In The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.
©1971 1971 by Bernard Malamud, renewed 1999 by Ann D. Malamud (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Dubin's Lives
Summary
With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon, Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all." The protagonist is one of Malamud's finest characters: prize-winning biographer William Dubin, who learns from lives, or thinks he does - those he writes, those he shares, the life he lives. Now, in his later middle age, he seeks his own secret self, and the obsession of biography is supplanted by the obsession of love - love for a woman half is age, who has sought an understanding of her life through his books. Dubin's Lives is a rich, subtle book, as well as a moving tale of love and marriage.
©1977, 1979 Bernard Malamud (P)2014 Audible Inc.
God's Grace: A Novel
Summary
God's Grace, Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood - a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island - baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.
©1982 Bernard Malamud (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
A New Life: A Novel
Summary
In A New Life, Bernard Malamud - generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer - took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention. When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it. A New Life as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear - is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.
©1961 Bernard Malamud, renewed 1989 by Ann D. Malamud (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Assistant
Summary
Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store. Like Malamud's best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers.
©1957, 1985 Bernard Malamud (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Magic Barrel
Summary
From the author of The Natural comes a classic short story about a young rabbinical student and his fateful encounter with an enigmatic matchmaker. A co-production with the National Jewish Theater. Recorded before a live audience at Chicago’s Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in July 1992. Adapted and Directed by Arnold Aprill Producing Director Susan Albert Loewenberg Shelley Berman as Salzman David Cromer as Leo Finkle Marge Kotlisky as Mrs. Salzman Naama Potok as Lily Hirschorn Malcolm Rothman as The Narrator Jensen Wheeler as Stella Radio Producer: Robert Neuhaus Recording Engineer: Larry Rock
©1992 L.A. Theatre Works (P)1992 L.A. Theatre Works
The Complete Stories
Summary
The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud is "an essential American book", Richard Stern declared in the Chicago Tribune when the collection was published in hardcover. His praise was echoed by other reviewers and by audiences, who embraced the book as they might a displaced person in one of Malamud's stories, now returned to us, complete and fulfilled and recognized at last. The volume gathers together 55 stories, from "Armistice" (1940) to "Alma Redeemed" (1984), and including the immortal stories from The Magic Barrel and the vivid depictions of the unforgettable Fidelman. It is a varied and generous collection of great examples of the modern short story, which Malamud perfected, and an ideal introduction to the work of this great American writer.
©1997 Ann Malamud (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 2
Summary
Nelson Algren reading from The Man With the Golden Arm, James Jones reading from The Thin Red Line, John Updike reading “Lifeguard” from Pigeon Feathers and Other, Bernard Malamud reading from “The Mourners” from The Magic Barrre.
©1963 Calliope Author Readings (P)1963 Calliope Author Readings