The Tenants

A Novel

By: Bernard Malamud

Narrated by: LJ Ganser

With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon

In The Tenants (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.

©1971 1971 by Bernard Malamud, renewed 1999 by Ann D. Malamud (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Brilliantly

funny! If you're an aspiring writer, you need to buy this book! It brings to life a world occupied by writers...

Story of Stubbornness and Bad Decisions

This book wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. Maybe it didn’t age well. Malamud’s writing style flows well but the story itself was somewhat disappointing. The main character makes a series of disappointing decisions and his main antagonist is made from a aggregate of bad 1950’s and 60’s stereotypes. In the end, the character you thought might be the villain turns out to be the only one with any sense. Glad I read it but . . . Meh
The reading was done well though!

Awful

Writing about writing seldom I works. It doesn't here; neither does the take on race relations.