 First edition | |
| Author | Bernard Malamud |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | Sept. 27, 1971 [1] |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 252 pp [1] |
| ISBN | 0374521026 [1] |
| OCLC | 175868 |
| 813/.54 | |
| LC Class | PS3563.A4 |
| Preceded by | Pictures of Fidelman (1969) |
| Followed by | Rembrandt's Hat (1973) |
The Tenants is the sixth novel of Bernard Malamud, published in 1971. [2]
Malamud began the initial composition of the novel in 1969 and completed it in 1971. [3] Its plot concerns a rivalry between two writers—one of them a Jew and the other an African-American— who are the last two persons remaining in a soon to be condemned apartment building. [4] Before Malamud began writing this novel, he'd already "published two short stories treating relationships between blacks and Jews": "Angel Levine" (1955) and "Black Is My Favorite Color" (1963). [5] And in at least one other story, "The Mourners" (1955), he had examined the fraught relationship between a tenant and a landlord. After he'd completed the novel, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction." [6]
When Malamud was asked, during an interview, what "set off" the writing of his novel, he replied: "Jews and blacks, the period of the troubles in New York City; the teachers strike, the rise of black activism, the mix-up of cause and effect. I thought I'd say a word." [7] Malamud's biographer explains the genesis of the novel this way:
Malamud's imagination had been set going initially by a series of newspaper reports in January 1969 on New York slum landlords, seeking to get lingering tenants out of apartment properties which the landlords wished to sell off or tear down and convert into new office buildings. Essential water, heating, and elevator services were shut off; telephone threats were made. [8]
A quick synopsis of the book's story was provided in the book jacket:
The sole tenant in a run-down tenement, Harry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Harry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend, Irene, and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now: it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing. [9]
As the story unfolds, all the building's residents have moved out with the exception of Lesser, who believes he's the sole remaining occupant and plans on staying until he completes his third novel. Lesser believes that it is crucial for him to remain in familiar surroundings so as not to break his writing routine. Then he hears the sound of a typewriter and soon discovers that it belongs to Willie Spearmint (who eventually adopts Bill Spear as a pen name) who has taken over one of the abandoned apartments as his writing space. [10]
The time of the novel seems to be set in the final years of the 1960s, "a time of racial strife affecting both the book's Jewish and black characters." The novel's point of view is through Harry Lesser and "is rendered in third-person-limited narration." [10]
The Fixer is a novel by Bernard Malamud published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kiev in the Russian Empire in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or the "Beilis affair". Although Beilis was acquitted after a lengthy process by an all-Slavic jury, the legal process sparked international criticism of antisemitism in the Russian Empire.
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The Tenants is a 2005 film drama directed by Danny Green and starring Dylan McDermott and Snoop Dogg. It is based on the 1971 novel The Tenants by Bernard Malamud.
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Jewish American literature holds an essential place in the literary history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of which has been Yiddish. While critics and authors generally acknowledge the notion of a distinctive corpus and practice of writing about Jewishness in America, many writers resist being pigeonholed as "Jewish voices." Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot be considered representative of Jewish American literature, one example being Isaac Asimov.
Dubin's Lives is the seventh published novel by the American writer Bernard Malamud. The title character is a biographer working on a life of D. H. Lawrence. It first appeared in hardcover from the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1979. Portions of the novel originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Playboy. It is still in print, Farrar, Straus and Giroux having reissued a paperback edition in 2003 with an Introduction by Thomas Mallon.
Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews (ISBN 0-394-50110-1) was first published in 1978 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York. According to S. Lillian Kremer in Dictionary of Literary Biography, The book is "a compendium of scholarship about Jewish civilization and its relation to the myriad cultures with which Judaism has come into contact."
John Roberts Tunis, "the 'inventor' of the modern sports story", was an American writer and broadcaster. Known for his juvenile sports novels, Tunis also wrote short stories and non-fiction, including a weekly sports column for the New Yorker magazine. As a commentator Tunis was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports cast and the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to the United States.
Bernard Malamud’s short story "The Mourners” first appeared in Discovery in January 1955. The story was included in Malamud's first collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, published in 1958.
The Angel Levine is a 1970 American drama film directed by Ján Kadár and starring Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte, Ida Kamińska, Milo O'Shea, and Gloria Foster. It is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud about Morris Mishkin, an elderly, impoverished New York City tailor who becomes unable to work due to health problems. His wife has also been seriously ill for two years, and their situation is now desperate. The tailor's Jewish faith, or lack of it, is challenged when a man calling himself Alexander Levine enters his life, claiming to be his guardian angel. Levine says that he must make the tailor believe in his mission, or fail to earn his angelic wings.
The Lazarus Project is a 2008 novel by Bosnian fiction writer and journalist Aleksandar Hemon. It features the true story of the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a teenaged Jewish immigrant to Chicago who was shot and killed by a police officer in 1908. It was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the winner of the inaugural Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in 2010.
Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition is the fifth published novel of Bernard Malamud. It is a novel in the form of a short story cycle, which gathers six stories dealing with Arthur Fidelman, an art student from the Bronx who travels to Italy, initially to research Giotto, but also with the hopes of becoming a painter. It was published in 1969 and includes stories from Malamud's earlier collections The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963), plus two previously uncollected stories and one previously unpublished story.
Blackbriar is a 1972 supernatural young adult coming-of-age novel by William Sleator and was Sleator's first young adult novel. The book has been translated into German as Das Geisterhaus and into Danish as Det forheksede hus.
Andrej Blatnik is a Slovene writer, editor, and university professor.
Howard Owen is an American author. He is a writer of literary fiction, mystery, and thrillers. He was the winner of the 2012 Hammett Prize awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers.