The Magic Barrel is a collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1958 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It won the 1959 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. The stories included are : "The Magic Barrel" starts as the about-to-be rabbi Leo Finkle has been urged by his teachers to find a wife before he actually becomes a rabbi; he gets a bigger congregation that way, they say. Because he is quite incapable and has almost finished his study , he answers an ad of a marriage counselor. Unhappy and terribly sorry about a meeting with one of the proposed... women, he retreats back again to his study. The marriage counselor suddenly turns up delivering him photographs of women, which he initially ignores. However, something draws him to them and after viewing several of them he discovers another one in the envelope. He instantly falls in love with that picture and yearns to meet her.
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