Janna Malamud Smith

Janna Malamud Smith photo by Debi Milligan

MY FATHER IS A BOOK


"Courageous… intimate… Smith is a passionate and uncompromising truth-teller, and it is by telling the truth that she has honored her father and mother as well as her readers."
Jonathan Kirsch, L.A. Times

"Beautiful… a profound portrait of a loving father."
Publishers Weekly

"My Father Is a Book does what the best reminiscences of artists do: It leads us back to the work."
Edith Pearlman, The Boston Globe

"At once loving and lovely, a book worthy of [Malamud]."
Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"This beautifully written book should do much to rekindle interest in Malamud's work."
Heller McAlpin, Newsday

"Deserving… generous-spirited… compelling."
Steve Weinberg, San Francisco Chronicle

"Moving, unostentatiously eloquent... Analytical without being acrimonious, honest without wallowing in self-preening exposure, this is a wise, generous book full of insights..."
Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

"Candid yet sensitive… exquisitely captures ‘the particular psychic pleasure and confusion’ of being the daughter of novelist/​short-story writer Bernard Malamud… The author amply demonstrates that she has inherited her father's unblinking moral scrutiny and sympathy for the yearning heart."
Kirkus Reviews

Selected Works

Non-fiction
My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
"Beautiful...A must for anyone interested in the work of Bernard Malamud, or the writer's life..." Mary Gordon
1. Non-Fiction
Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life
“a gorgeously written anecdotal cultural history of the emergence and the fragile sanctity of the modern creative self…”
-The New York Times Book Review
2. Non-fiction
A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear
“reads like a deep, intelligent conversation with a valued woman friend.”
--Ottawa Citizen
"Fascinating. . . provocative."
--Washington Post