God's Grace: A Novel

by Bernard Malamud, Dara Horn (Introduction)

Overview

God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood -- a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction.

The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son -- a "marginal error" -- finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world.

With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.

"Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations." --Cynthia Ozick

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466804951
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/15/2005
Series:	FSG Classics
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	591,098
File size:	201 KB

About the Author

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) also wrote eight novels, he won the Pulitzer Prize and a second National Book award for The Fixer. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.

Bernard Malamud (1914–86) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.

Date of Birth:

April 28, 1914

Date of Death:

March 18, 1986

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., City College of New York, 1936; M.A., Columbia University, 1942

Editorial Reviews

An impressive novel.…It is impossible to do justice here to Malamud's wit and style.
—Sunday Telegraph

Penelope Lively