“The Magic Barrel” was originally published in the November 1954 issue of The Partisan Review. It was collected in The Magic Barrel (1958). It is currently most readily available in Malamud's The Complete Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

I first met Bernard Malamud in 1966. I was an ambitious boy of 23, with a debut novel about to appear and the selfconfident conviction that I could and should replace him while he took a leave of absence from his teaching job. He was leaving Bennington College for what turned out to be a twoyear stint in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I drifted into town and was hired—astonishingly, I still believe—by elders who saw something in this junior they might shape. By the time the Malamuds returned, I was happily ensconced as their near neighbor in Vermont; over the years we grew close.

The relation was avuncular; though Bennington's faculty is unranked, Malamud was much my senior colleague. It was and is a small school and town, and the Language and Literature Division seemed very small indeed. We attended committee meetings and movies and concerts and readings and poker games together; we shared meals and walks. When I married in 1970, the Malamuds came to the wedding; when they gave a party we helped to cut the cake. With no hint of condescension he described me as his protégé; I asked for and took his advice. My wife's day-book bulks large with collective occasions: cocktails, picnics, weddings, and funerals shared. In times of celebration or trouble—when our daughters were born or had birthdays, during the years I served as Director of the Bennington Writing Workshops, at ceremonies in his honor or when in failing health Bern needed a hand with a suitcase or car—we saw each other often. At his death on March 18, 1986, it seemed to me and to my wife and children that we had lost a relative. The loss endures.

So I can't and won't pretend to critical distance; this is an author I loved and admire. At his best he strikes me as an enduring master of the twentieth century; his best consists of the early novels (The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life) and a baker's dozen of short stories.