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 be 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?
-
-
In commemoration of the centenary of Bernard Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914), FSG's Work in Progress will be celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature throughout the week. 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.
-
In commemoration of the centenary of Bernard Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914), FSG's Work in Progress will be celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature throughout the week. With The Tenants (1971), his sixth novel, Bernard Malamud took a risk and wrote a book about two writers stuck in a nearly condemned building, in the urban wasteland of an America riddled with conflict. His need to dramatize in fiction a clash between race and individual will, between determination and creation, was clearly made urgent by the events and political transformation of the late sixties. The urgency is evident both in his reducing the politically vast conflict to bare essentials (two writers—an African-American and a Jew—one woman, one empty building, one destroyed manuscript), as well as in his consequent refusal, perhaps even inability, to provide any resolution to the tensions of the book. The Tenants is rife with discord and confusion and unanswerable questions, all leading to an eventual narrative disintegration that closely corresponds to the breakdown of order and civility the book depicts. Absent is soothing narrative harmony; absent is the recollection in tranquility; but present is the painful immediacy of a world in which writers cannot produce. A library of books exists about the inability to write, but The Tenants is a different beast. It’s a book about the impossibility of writing in a world which is about to be condemned. At the same time, it reaffirms the need for literature as a mode of human engagement with the world, insufferable though the world may be.
-
In commemoration of the centenary of Bernard Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914), FSG's Work in Progress will be celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature throughout the week. 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.
-
In commemoration of the centenary of Bernard Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914), FSG's Work in Progress will be celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature throughout the week. What’s the difference between a good book and a great book? Good books can be engrossing, insightful, and new. Good books often receive critical praise, and some even stand the test of time. Good books are sometimes better—in the commonly used senses of readability and craftsmanship—than great books. (Just ask anyone who admires a great book without ever having finished it.) Great books are what our world needs, but good books are what our culture desires, so good books are what most authors, most of the time, aspire to write.