The Magic Barrel was chosen out of all the American fiction of its year to receive the National Book Award of 1959 - an honour which had only once before been accorded to a book of short stories, those of William Faulkner. Malamud's great gifts as a writer are his humour, his profound concern for all human life and his ability to transmute common things and people into a strange poetry - as the New York Herald Tribune said 'He is master of an alchemy whereby the grossest reality is converted to the most imaginative uses. He transcribes everyday life and yet the result glows with lights never seen on land or sea.'

Many of Malamud's characters are Jewish (the title story, for example, is about a rabbinical student trying to find a wife through a very peculiar marriage broker) but through his gentle and haunting exploration of their predicaments he illuminates a region that is common to every man's world.