The Tenants.

First Edition of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants; Warmly Inscribed by Him to Close Friends Suzanne and Paul Shrag

The Tenants.

MALAMUD, Bernard.

$450.00

Item Number: 100067

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

First edition of Malamud’s sixth novel. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Susie and Paul With affection for dear friends- Bern.” The recipients, Suzanne and Paul Shrag were close friends of Malamud and brother of printmaker Karl Schrag. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Malamud began the initial composition of the novel in 1969 and completed it in 1971. Its plot concerns a rivalry between two writers—one of them a Jew and the other an African-American— who are the last two persons remaining in a soon to be condemned apartment building. Before Malamud began writing this novel, he'd already "published two short stories treating relationships between blacks and Jews": "Angel Levine" (1955) and "Black Is My Favorite Color" (1963). And in at least one other story, "The Mourners" (1955), he had examined the fraught relationship between a tenant and a landlord. After he'd completed the novel, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction."

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