This is an absolutely brilliant, beautiful, touching, and incisive novel by the writer of The Natural and the various story collections I’ve been reading recently. It’s based on a reworking of one of his previous stories in which we watch the terror and dread of a storekeeper as an empty store on his street is being reworked as a new deli. His own store, a former deli turned more into a grocery is middling, and this seems in part (and certainly this is his perception) because […]
The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer’s surprise, already clawed.
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
