Cover artist Milton Glaser Language English Pages 214 Originally published 1958 Genre Fiction Set in New York City and Italy | Country US Media type Print (Hardcover) OCLC 289279 Page count 214 | |
 | ||
Awards National Book Award for Fiction Similar The Fixer, The Assistant, The Natural, Idiots first, A New Life | ||
The magic barrel part one
The Magic Barrel is a 1958 collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published in by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Also, the Jewish Publication Society released its own edition at the same time. It won the 1959 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Contents
The 13 stories included in The Magic Barrel appear in the following sequence:
The magic barrel
Stories
This section provides a brief capsule view of each story, including links to relevant articles. Also see: Bernard Malamud bibliography for additional details:
– first published in the Partisan Review (September–October 1950 issue)
– first appeared in Discovery in January, 1955
– originally appeared in American Mercury, January 1953
– The short story Angel Levine was made into a 1970 film starring Harry Belafonte and Zero Mostel and directed by Ján Kadár.
– this is one of five "Italian" stories (i.e., set in Italy) Malamud wrote, excluding the 6 stories that appeared in Pictures of Fidelman.
– first appeared in Commentary in the September 1950 issue
– The title story starts as the about-to-be rabbi Leo Finkle has been urged by his teachers to find a wife before he actually becomes a rabbi; he gets a bigger congregation that way, they say. Because he is quite incapable (he recognizes this later on in the story and presumes his study stole his social life) and has almost finished his study (and thus has to hurry), he answers an ad of a marriage counselor. Unhappy and terribly sorry about a meeting with one of the proposed women, he retreats back again to his study. The marriage counselor suddenly turns up delivering him photographs of women, which he initially ignores. However, something draws him to them and after viewing several of them he discovers another one in the envelope. He instantly falls in love with that picture and yearns to meet her. After he's found the marriage counselor (who left him immediately after delivering the photographs) the girl turns out to be the counselor's daughter (though at first the counselor states it's one of the photographs that should have been in the barrel; hence Finkle thinks of the barrel as magic). He gets to meet her anyway; the marriage counselor (her father) hiding around the corner, "chanting prayers for the dead. [Marc Blitzstein] adapted the story as a libretto for a one-act opera, the music for which he began but completed only a scene and a song. Said song was premiered at the 1964 Marc Blitzstein Memorial Concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein and recorded on Koch by William Sharp. A performance of it by Erin Passmore, introduced and accompanied by Leonard Lehrman, at the 2012 Halifax Summer Opera Workshop was videotaped and posted on YouTube.