This volume brings together fifty-four stories written over four decades - from "Armistice," which Malamud wrote on the job at the U.S. Census Department in 1940, to "Alma Redeemed," written in 1984, by which time Malamud was a distinguished man of letters with an array of honors, the admiration of his peers, and the acclaim of readers.

In his early stories (beginning with his first collection, The Magic Barrel, published in 1959), Malamud refashioned the American short story in the Yiddish-inflected idiom of his boyhood. The Magic Barrel and its successor, Idiots First (1963), included stories about the unforgettable Fidelman, a "self-confessed failure as a painter" whose misadventures in Rome and elsewhere eventually were gathered in Pictures of Fidelman (1969).

The stories in Rembrandt's Hat (1973) as well as the late stories "Alma Redeemed" (about Alma Mahler) and "In Kew Gardens" (about Virginia Woolf) explore the tense negotiation between life and art, a theme of Malamud's later novels.

In all his work, Malamud was concerned to identify and dramatize a quality he spoke of as "the human." This quality is found in the way his characters cling to hope against all reason, in their capacity for sudden deep feeling and their awareness of the world's comic indifference to their aspirations.