Designed to provide writers with insights into the way a master thinks about and practices his craft, this collection includes discussions of the novel, the short story, subject matter, work in progress, revision, and the Jewish experience. Malamud also discusses the responsibilities of the writer.

"An impressive gathering of the late Malamud's essays, interviews, lectures and notes. . . . In addition to admirers of Malamud's fiction, this book should also be of considerable interest to aspiring writers, as Malamud is open and revealing about his own creative process, and consistently engaging in his often politicized and outspoken views on the artist's role in society".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

When he sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1979, Alan Cheuse was hardly new to the literary world. He had studied at Rutgers under John Ciardi, worked at the Breadloaf Writing Workshops with Robert Frost and Ralph Ellison, written hundreds of reviews for Kirkus Reviews, and taught alongside John Gardner and Bernard Malamud at Bennington College for nearly a decade. Soon after the New Yorker story appeared, Cheuse wrote a freelance magazine piece about a new, publicly funded broadcast network called National Public Radio, and a relationship of reviewer and...

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these twonovellas are linked so skillfullythattheyachieve the intensity ofa single novel in which some characters succeed and others failonseparate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wishto be crematedonly to find herself entirelyat sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism,"Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his lifewhen he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for...