Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2006
304 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
On the twentieth anniversary of Bernard Malamud's death, Janna Malamud Smith explores her father's private, unpublished letters and journals to remember the life of a seminal writer of our time. Malamud left New York and his immigrant father's failing grocery store, and his mother's madness, for a humble position at an Oregon agricultural college. Smith remembers his demanding, ambitious writing schedule and his marriage's fragile balance, but also his charm, humor, and devotion. She evokes the heady culture of his return east to Bennington and Harvard in the sixties and reveals her father's intimacies—and her own—from that radically changing time.
"Starred Review. Smith offers a profound portrait of a loving father, a writer whose struggles with his own frailties fueled enduring works of literature." - PW.
"Candid yet sensitive, this memoir by clinical social worker Smith (A Potent Spell, 2003, etc.) exquisitely captures "the particular psychic pleasure and confusion" of being the daughter of novelist/short-story writer Bernard Malamud." - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Janna Malamud Smith is the author of An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery; A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear; and Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Her titles have been New York Times Notable Books and A Potent Spell was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick. She has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.
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