Bernard Malamud Centenary

FSG's Work in Progress A New Birthday Suit for Bernard Sean McDonald, Charlotte Strick and Jude Landry Bernard Malamud Centenary

In April 2014, art director Charlotte Strick and typographer Jude Landry gave FSG's Bernard Malamud library a sharp makeover on the occasion of Malamud's centenary. Here we reveal the new, soon-to-be-classic covers for the first time, and Charlotte and Jude discuss the ins and outs of giving a new look to a true icon of twentieth-century American literature. Sean McDonald: What's it like to get assigned a project like redesigning the entire oeuvre of a great American writer, one who's having his 100th birthday this month, who's going into the Library of America as we speak? What's your first step? Charlotte Strick: One of the great thrills and responsibilities of being the art director of the paperback list at a publishing house like FSG is the opportunity to repackage important backlist titles. A decade or so ago I was a designer on staff when Lynn Buckley was charged with the very same task. It was an exciting process to witness, and the design community applauded her results. This April we're celebrating Mr. Malamud's 100th birthday, so last year our paperback director [Sean McDonald] approached me to give these same books a centennial face-lift. My first step was to look back at how his books had been handled by different designers over the years. Read on...

The Fixer: An Introduction Jonathan Safran Foer Bernard Malamud Centenary

When I finished reading this novel, I felt castigated and inspired. Grumbling about the state of the world suddenly wasn't enough. And excusing myself from political activity felt wrong. In light of this book, my inaction felt immoral. While The Fixer isn't a book about morality, it is a moral book. That is, rather than offering a flimsy directive, it presents the reader with a forceful question: Why aren't you doing anything? Read on...

The Magic Barrel: An Introduction Jhumpa Lahiri Bernard Malamud Centenary

We are all haunted by certain writers whom we have never read. "I should read that author," we think guiltily to ourselves in libraries, at bookstores, during dinner-party conversations. "One of these days," we assure ourselves, "I'll pick that up." Perhaps the author has been recommended to us, by a friend, a teacher, a glowing review. Or perhaps we are simply aware that the author is one of the greats, a celebrated master of his craft, a creative genius we would be sorry to miss. Read on...

The Tenants: An Introduction Aleksandar Hemon Bernard Malamud Centenary

The Tenants marks a turning point in the history of American letters: the beginning of the rise of identity politics in literature and the related loss of confidence in the possibility of "pure art." Malamud's greatness lies in the fact that he is simultaneously capable of lamenting the end of pure "humanist" art and of recognizing the inevitability of the social transformations that have made it untenable. Read on...

The Natural: An Introduction Kevin Baker Bernard Malamud Centenary

Bernard Malamud was thirty-eight years old when he published The Natural (1952), his antiheroic tale about a baseball player whose ambitions and desires are constantly thwarted, and one can't help wonder how much of the story reflects the author's own frustrations. It was his first novel, and while thirty-eight is still young for a writer, if not for a ballplayer, Malamud's career had already been deferred for years by his need to scrape out a living during the Great Depression, and then by the Second World War. Read on...