Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work Book

"I think it hurts a writer," said fiction writer Bernard Malamud, "to have his secrets known--his method of working disclosed while he is still active." Malamud was, according to his colleagues Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco (the editors of Talking Horse), "resolutely private about the construction of his finished work." Maybe so. But over a lifetime, he wrote an impressive amount of material about his own work, and about fiction in general. Talking Horse collects much of that material--speeches, book introductions, interviews, lesson plans, essays, and more. Included here are notes on The Natural, a defense of fantasy, musings on the great task of embarking on a novel, and a discussion about Jewishness in American fiction. Though most fiction writers see the short story as a warm-up for writing longer fiction, Malamud loved the form. "Within a dozen or few more pages," he said, "whole lives are implied and even understood." He displays here, by turns, endearing humility ("it took years for my work to impress me"), a piercing intellect, disdain for "gossips" who want to know the person behind the fiction, and a strong belief not only that the work must speak for itself, but that there is likely "more to a book or short story than the writer himself knows." A very satisfying collection from a man who liked to claim that "as a writer I learned from Charlie Chaplin." --Jane Steinberg