I'm ~ 100/600 pages in. The stories are wonderfully devastating. One can only take so much of that.

Incredible collection of short stories - must read if you are Jewish!!

Πρόκειται για τον 1ο τόμο απάντων των διηγημάτων του Malamud. O παρών τόμος ξεκινάει από το 1940
και ολοκληρώνεται 1963, ενώ τα καλύτερα διηγήματα ξεκινάνε το 1956.
Ξεχώρισα τα παρακάτω: Ο λογαριασμός, Έλεος, Το ασανσέρ, Μία συγνώμη, Ο τελευταίος των Μοϊκανών, Η αρχόντισσα της λίμνης, Να το κλειδί.
"Ο έρωτας έρχεται με τον κατάλληλο άνθρωπο όχι νωρίτερα."

From this collection I have read the following: The First Seven Years, The Magic Barrel, The Mourners, Angel Levine, Take Pity, The Last Mohican, Idiots First, The Jewbird, Man in the Drawer, and The Silver Crown

I no longer rate books with stars. This is a fantastic set of tragic yet uplifting stories, some naturalistic some magical, generally depicting the lives of poor immigrants and their children to the United States, and their struggles to maintain some joy and dignity in the face of economic and social oppression. There are also a few stories depicting the lives of the struggling artist. These are Emma Lazarus' tired and hungry masses brought to life; the stories feel very real, from the spoken vernacular to the travails confronting the characters. These are profoundly moving stories, to be savored one at a time like one does a poem. They manage to express the ineffable.

Wonderful. I rationed myself to two or three stories a day to better savour the pleasure of Malamud’s writing. When he is at the top of his game (as he usually is), the tales touch me deeply. I generally admire the ‘Italian’ tales but the Fidelman stories were truly annoying. The tales of Alma Mahler and Virginia Woolf were disappointing to me as well. I’ll have to take another look at those stories in a little while.

What an amazing collection this is, and fascinating to experience the arc of his work moving into experimentalism and ultimately becoming a very personal amalgam of tradition and stylistic innovations.

I am struck by how pure a fiction writer he is--his life experiences are pounded into the ore of his stories in such a holistic and non-egoistic way that they are simply another literary implement in the craftsman's tool kit. Modern writers often over-use biography to the point of artlessness.

Not Malamud.

I think I am going to have to own this book (I took it out of the library--twice.)

So many of these will remain with me:

The Silver Crown - wherein the practical individual discovers the truth when he tussles with the mystical

The Place is Different Now - What reading can and cannot provide

All the Fidelman stories, but especially The Glass Blower of Venice for its ahead-of-its-time story

Black is my Favorite Color for the same reason

Angel Levine, Lady of the Lake...so many. So many truly great stories.

No one can touch this short story master.

Yoooo George what a phony!!!!

Quite a long book to get through, but I was determined this first month of 2022 to read this and a few novels by Malamud. It's Malamud month. These stories are --most of them, at least--amazing little investigations into the lives of small grocers or poor artists or struggling students. Written over four decades, the stories range from pure realism to some wonderful mystical fantasy. I enjoyed the two novels better (The Natural and The Assistant--his masterpiece-- I'd say), but many of these stories are pure gems.

This book suffers from being every single short story in the authors cannon without any curation. The result is that a few good stories and one or two great ones get drowned in a sea of mediocrity, Malamud fashioning far more forgettable stories than notable ones in his career. One of my favourite short story writers of all time, Flannery O'connor, called him one of the best short of all time, but for me far too often something magic is missing.

3.75