The Tenants by Bernard Malamud [FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING] 1971

The Tenants by Bernard Malamud 

FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING [1971] FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX

Dust jacket has visible shelf wear and scratching, some frayed edges and a few small sealed edge tears.  Book itself looks and reads beautifully; a few spots of discloration to red cloth boards. 

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.