Come Back Malamud, All Is Forgiven

Even Richard Ford left him out of The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. Unfair. The time is ripe for a Malamud revival, and Joyce Carol Oates seems to agree: "Given the relative narrowness of Malamud’s subject matter, the more subdued range of his writerly voice, and an aesthetic puritanism temperamentally at odds with the flamboyant self-displays of Bellow (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) and Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint, etc), it seems inevitable, if unfortunate, that he should come to seem, in time, the least impressive of the four." (The fourth being Isaac Bashevis Singer.)