Bernard Malamud, renowned as a novelist, was also highly acclaimed as a writer of short stories. He himself wrote: 'Short stories, perhaps better than other forms of fiction, point up the haste and heaviness of the odds against us, and our million daily miraculous escapes from the worst of fates and the best of insights.' The magic in Malamud's stories is once again evident in Idiots First, both in the strange fantasy of a story like 'The Jewbird' or the title story 'Idiots First' and in the deeply moving realism of 'The German Refugee'. It is in the wit and comic gusto of 'Still Life' and in the strangeness of 'Naked Nude'.