Bernard Malamud likely was best known for his novel The Natural before the Robert Redford film adaptation hit movie screens. Since then, The Natural is almost certainly the author’s most famous work of fiction. Despite the fact that his allegorical baseball myth is likely the only book written by Malamud that most Americans could pick out of a lineup, however, his only Pulitzer Prize was for a later novel: The Fixer. That novel also earned Malamud the other prestigious literary award handed out each year, the National Book Award for Fiction. That honor was the second one bestowed upon the author. Nearly a decade earlier, Bernard Malamud won the National Book Award for Fiction not for a novel, but his debut collection of short fiction: The Magic Barrel and Other Stories.
The collection was first published in 1958 and comprises a lucky thirteen stories which Malamud had previously published in magazines. Among the renowned periodicals in which some of the stories first appeared are the Partisan Review and Commentary. The title story brings the compilation to a conclusion and preceding that (one of Malamud’s most anthologized works) are the following:
"The First Seven Years"
"The Mourners"
"The Girl of My Dreams"
"Angel Levine"
"Behold the Key"
"Take Pity"
"The Prison"
"The Lady of the Lake"
"A Summer's Reading"
"The Bill"
"The Last Mohican"
"The Loan"
Like the bulk of Malamud’s fiction (notably excluding, curiously, The Natural) most of the stories here are centered upon the Jewish experience in America. (The title story, for instance, is about a man on the verge of becoming a rabbi.) As one critic noted, however, the Jewish experiences “of The Magic Barrel…are not the [that] of New York or Chicago.” Yet another critic characterizes not only the stories contained with this volume, but the majority of the author’s canon of short fiction as “love stories, though love stories of an unusual kind.”
One of the stories, “The Last Mohican” would eventually be republished in Malamud’s “novel” Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. In reality, that book is a cycle of short stories connected to each other through the presence of the titular character. “Angel Levine” would be adapted into a film in 1970 under the slightly different title The Angel Levine.
