Showing results for "The Assistant" in Literary Fiction

Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store.

When Parsifal, a handsome and charming magician, dies suddenly, his widow Sabine—who was also his faithful assistant for twenty years—learns that the family he claimed to have lost in a tragic accident is very much alive and well. Sabine is left to unravel his secrets, and the adventure she...

"The dead can't hurt you. Only the living can." Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies - and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer's shortcomings.

Nathan Porter, a young war veteran haunted by an atrocity he witnessed, ends up in an animation studio in southern California, where his dismal romantic history is upended by Violet Delmar, an older voice-over artist known nationally as "The Voice." Violet's siren song wafts in and out of Nathan's entire life, twisting through his misguided affairs and marriage, until he finds himself awakened, thanks to Violet, about no less than all of love and art.

“A story of choices and events so intimate I felt I was part of it. The novel is wrenching, the emotions radiant, and it will leave readers transformed” —Luanne Rice, author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners “Joyce Maynard has outdone herself in this beautifully written story you’ll...