Natural

" A brilliant and unusually fine novel." -- "The New York Times"
" A preposterously readable story about life." -- "Time"
" Malamud [holds a] high and honored place among contemporary American writers." -- "Washington Post Book World"
" The finest novel about baseball since Ring Lardner left the scene." -- "St. Louis Post-Dispatch"
"A brilliant and unusually fine novel." --"The New York Times""A preposterously readable story about life." --"Time""Malamud [holds a] high and honored place among contemporary American writers." --"Washington Post Book World""The finest novel about baseball since Ring Lardner left the scene." --"St. Louis Post-Dispatch"

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new editionIntroduction by Kevin BakerThe Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first--and some would say still the best--novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material--the story of a superbly gifted natural at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era--and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: Malamud has done something which--now that he has done it!--looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.