Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A New Life

A New Life

Lethem, Jonathan
Malamud, Bernard

Paperback

Series: FSG Classics

HumorClassic FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $26.99

ISBN10: 0374529493
ISBN13: 9780374529499
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: Sep 13 2004
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.75
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.30
Language: English

An overlooked masterpiece. It may still be undervalued as Malamud's funniest and most embracing novel. --Jonathan Lethem

In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.

When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him. Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.

A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.

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