The Natural (FSG Classics) - Softcover

Malamud, Professor Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374502005 ISBN 13: 9780374502003

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review:

"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

Book Description:

A baseball player struggling with a god-given gift and human passions is given a second chance to become what he always dreamed he could be: the best there ever was.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0374502005
• ISBN 13: 9780374502003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 231