Magic Barrel

'The experience of reading The Magic Barrel was akin to a rite of initiation... The stories settled swiftly and deeply into my consciousness; now that I have read them, I cannot believe there was ever a time I had not' Jhumpa Lahiri

A matchmaker finds love for a would-be rabbi; a shopkeeper dies because he cannot afford a doctor; a little girl steals candy; an angel visits a grieving tailor. Through Malamud's great gifts as a writer - humour and profound concern for the matter of human life - he transmutes the particular struggles of everyday sufferers into a strange poetry.