25 iconic book covers are on display over at Abe Books. Most likely you’ve already seen these, but, like old photographs, new details catch your eye every time you look at them.

Of the many fine covers, we like this version of The Natural, Bernard Malamud’s classic ode to baseball and the American Dream.

Here’s an old NY Times book review, written by Harry Sylvester in 1952.

Back in the Thirties the baseball writers making the swing through the West with major league teams occasionally wondered whether one of their number would ever produce a serious novel about baseball. That novel has finally been written and if the author does not come from the ranks of baseball reporters, at least he hails from Brooklyn and there are those who feel that qualifies him ex officio.

It’s an unusually fine novel, too, although I don’t know how the professionals are going to take it. For Bernard Malamud’s interests go far beyond baseball. What he has done is to contrive a sustained and elaborate allegory in which the “natural” player who operates with ease and the greatest skill, without having been taught is equated with the natural man who, left alone by, say, politicians and advertising agencies, might achieve his real fulfillment.

The book’s hero, Roy Hobbs, comes out of the West at the age of 19, brought to a major league training camp by a scout. He is shot by a girl in a hotel room and drops out of sight until, at the age of 34, he returns to the last place team in the National League and, with a trick bat not unlike that used by Heinie Groh of the Cincinnati Reds back in the Twenties — almost single-handed leads the team into a tie for first place. This he does despite various distractions by people whose names sometimes indicate their symbolism, sometimes deliberately obscure it. But Malamud has a mission and we grant him certain privileges, including the use of the super-realism he alternates with naturalism. As when Hobbs, baited by a dwarf in the stands, drives one liner after another, deliberately foul, at the cowering little man. Malamud also draws heavily on baseball legend and history, almost interchangeably.

All the story is here of a natural man — hurt badly by his first love, recovering late for his profession, almost achieving greatness, then distracted or betrayed by people or objects or events all equated with elements in our environment. In his telling and always deliberate use of the vernacular alternated with passages evocative and almost lyrical, in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture which elaborated it, Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual book.

There is a hotel that forgot
the names we wrote
between the cavities
of coarse thread counts.

A mirror warps somewhere
when it thinks about the wilting
butterfly of your palms.

I pluck daisies, walk
on the petals like a tightrope,
pretend your arms are the audience
waiting for the fall.

There will never be a shade of red
I can paint your cheeks with
without the day laborer of my mouth.

__________________________

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and the author of the upcoming flash fiction chapbook The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is A Robot (Safety Third  Enterprises, 2010). He is the Interview Editor of PANK Magazine and lives at iheartfailure.net.

Not For The Weak Of Heart

Last night we watched an 84-minute interview with David Foster Wallace. 84 minutes focused entirely on his face. We’ll be honest, we nodded off a couple times. Not because the video was boring (it was most certainly not), but because we hadn’t slept all that much the night before. Anyway, if you’re feeling sleepy this morning, we’ve got some literature news that’ll keep you going. Slate revisits The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, an account of three self-proclaimed messiahs in one mental ward. Most writers want to be known. Salinger did not. Perhaps because he suffered from the same problems of identity that 19th century American writers did. Be honest, have you ever really thought about plagiarism? No? Good for you, Honest Abe. As a reward you can read a review of Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine. Then do everyone a favor and get some rest. — Andrew Geer