The Natural
By Bernard Malamud; Kevin Baker (Introduction by)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Paperback, 9780374502003, 248pp.)
Publication Date: July 2003
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook,
Categories: Literary
 |     |
The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new edition
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.”
Bernard Malamud (1914–86) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.
“A brilliant and unusually fine novel.” —The New York Times
“A preposterously readable story about life.” —Time
“Malamud [holds a] high and honored place among contemporary American writers.” —Washington Post Book World
“The finest novel about baseball since Ring Lardner left the scene.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 |
1Q84 Haruki Murakami Knopf |
 |
The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus, and Giroux |
 |
The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Knopf |
 |
Death Comes to Pemberley PD James Knopf |
