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One of America’s great mythmakers, a storyteller who ranks with Flannery O’Connor as an unfolder of the mysteries of human character, Bernard Malamud is a writer of profound sympathy, intensity, and emotional truth. This third and final volume of Library of America’s Malamud edition brings together three novels and thirteen stories from the culminating phase of his extraordinary career.

Malamud returns to his native New York in The Tenants (1971), a fable-like novel about the growing rivalry between two writers—one Jewish, the other Black—who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house, each struggling to make art in the face of animosity and bitterness. “It was Malamud’s gift to pave a hardened city with metaphysical streets so that one feels both disembodied and rooted while reading him,” Jonathan Rosen has written. “His city, at once familiar, is still a place of surprises, of trials and of ultimate meaning.”

“If you know Dubin’s Lives,” Malamud once remarked, “you know me.” This 1979 novel, the most autobiographical of his major works, recounts the sexual misadventures and literary aspirations of William B. Dubin, a troubled middle-aged writer researching a life of D. H. Lawrence who becomes involved with a woman half his age. As the lines between biographer and subject blur, Malamud reflects, with wry humor and deep feeling, on how we are strangers even to ourselves.

God’s Grace (1982), Malamud’s last completed novel, is an inventive, darkly humorous tale set in a time after nuclear holocaust and a Second Flood. Finding himself shipwrecked on a remote island, Calvin Cohn, the lone human survivor of the Day of Devastation, attempts to establish a New Covenant with God—with the aid of a troop of talking chimps, several baboons, and a formidable yarmulke-wearing gorilla.

The stories in this volume demonstrate Malamud’s unparalleled mastery of the form, from the unbridled Kafkaesque fantasy of “Talking Horse” to the fictive biographies of “In Kew Gardens,” about Virginia Woolf, and “Alma Redeemed,” about Alma Mahler. Rounding out the volume are “Long Work, Short Life,” Malamud’s hard-to-find memoir of his writing life, and the previously unpublished “A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,” a poignant autobiographical story of the young Malamud’s growing anxieties about his parents’ lack of planning for his Bar-Mitzvah ceremony.

Philip Davis, editor, is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool, where he was Director of the Centre for Research, Literature and Society. He is the author of the definitive biography, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life.