Though unexpressed, there lurks in all these concurring animadversions a fear of the stigma of the “parochial” — a charge never directed (and why not?) against Cather’s prairie Bohemians, or the denizens of Updike’s Brewer or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Still, it is not through sober public rhetoric but in the wilder precincts of fiction that Malamud discloses his animating credo. It emerges in the clear voice of Levitansky, the antihero of “Man in the Drawer,” a harried Soviet Jewish writer whose work is barred from publication because it speaks human truths inimical to Stalinist policy. The American journalist who has worriedly befriended Levitansky asks whether he has submitted any Jewish stories, to which the writer retorts: “Please, stories are stories, they have not nationality. . . . When I write about Jews comes out stories, so I write about Jews.” It is this unanchored drive to create tales, Malamud implies, that generates subject matter — the very opposite of Henry James’s reliance on the story’s “germ,” the purloinings and devisings of the observed world. “Stories are stories” is Malamud’s ticket to untrammeled writerly freedom. Except to Scheherazade, he owes no social debts.

Despite this purist manifesto, Malamud is in fact steeped everywhere in social debt; his aesthetic is instinct with the muted pulse of what used to be called moral seriousness, a notion gone out of fashion in American writing, where too often flippancy is mistaken for irony. Malamud, a virtuoso of darkest irony, refuses the easy conventions of cynicism and its dry detachment. His stories know suffering, loneliness, lust, confinement, defeat; and even when they are lighter, they tremble with subterranean fragility. Older readers who were familiar with the novels and stories in the years of their earliest publication will recall the wonderment they aroused, beginning with the fables of “The Magic Barrel,” as each new tale disrupted every prevailing literary expectation. The voice was unlike any other, haunted by whispers of Hawthorne, Babel, Isak Dinesen, even Poe, and at the same time uniquely possessed: a fingerprint of fire and ash. It was as if Malamud were at work in a secret laboratory of language, smelting a new poetics that infused the inflections of one tongue into the music of another. His landscapes, nature’s and the mind’s, are inimitable; the Malamudian sensibility, its wounded openness to large feeling, has had no successors.

Image Malamud at home in Manhattan in 1980. Credit... Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

When the ambient culture changes, having moved toward the brittleness of wisecrack and indifference, and the living writer is no longer present, it can happen that a veil of forgetfulness falls over the work. And then comes a literary crisis: the recognition that a matchless civilizational note has been muffled. A new generation, mostly unacquainted with the risks of uncompromising and hard-edged compassion, deserves Malamud even more than the one that made up his contemporary readership. The idea of a writer who is intent on judging the world — hotly but quietly, and aslant, and through the subversions of tragic paradox — is nowadays generally absent: who is daring enough not to be cold-eyed? For Malamud, trivia has no standing as trivial, everything counts, everything is at stake — as in “The Jewbird,” where a bossy crowlike intruder named Schwartz invades a family, refuses birdseed in favor of herring, and to ingratiate himself tutors the dull son. But the father, sensing a rival for domination, is enraged, and this fanciful comedy ends in primal terror and murder. Pity leaves its signature even in farce.

“The Jewbird” is one of 36 stories to appear so far in the Library of America’s definitive three-volume publication (the third is forthcoming) honoring Malamud’s work on the 100th anniversary of his birth; six of these Malamud himself never saw in print. Also included in the initial volumes are five novels: “The Natural,” “The Assistant,” “A New Life,” “The Fixer” and “Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition.”