JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 By Zachary Leader Knopf, 784 pp, $40 By Steven G. Kellman In 1998, when the Modern Library polled readers to determine the 100 best novels in English, two books by Saul Bellow — “Henderson the Rain King” and “The Adventures of Augie March” — made the…
This Month Anne Reads: “Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow” The three of them, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Phillip Roth were our first team offering to America. They won prizes. They were the talk of the town and all the towns across the English-speaking world. Although their roots were in poorer places, their ambitions…
Scholars of Saul Bellow, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, can now peruse the most sizable collection of his personal papers that has yet been made available at the University of Chicago Library. Bellow, whose works include “Herzog,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” and “Humboldt’s Gift,” was a professor at the University for three decades….
In an exclusive on-the-record interview with The Backward, three members of the Nobel Prize Committee broke off from listening to Abba to explain their reasons for awarding the Literature Prize to a 1960s folk singer who sounds like a punctured accordion. “Oh, yah. We gave it to him mostly to keep screwing with Philip Roth’s…
In one of his last interviews in office, President Barack Obama told The New York Times’ chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, that he thinks Philip Roth and Saul Bellow rank among the greatest authors to explore the experience of being an outsider in the United States. “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like…
Philip Roth is one of Newark, New Jersey’s most famous sons. The novelist was born there, and has frequently used the city as a setting for his books. Now, he’s paying homage to Newark by pledging to donate his personal library to the Newark Public Library upon his death. In a press release, Roth explained…
‘Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. I realize that in pointing this out I risk stoking the moronic inferno of this season’s national seekers of high office, but also, more seriously, of mischaracterizing Saul Bellow’s genius.” —Why We Need…
There is that moment, when you’ve said or done something that possibly you will regret, but can’t be certain. Such were the seconds which followed the thin metallic thump of my envelope addressed to Saul Bellow as it briefly slid and fell to the bottom of my neighborhood mailbox. Years of musing about this letter…
Virtual
Dec 7, 2022
7 pm ET ·
A conversation with Julia Haart and her son Shlomo, stars of Netflix's 'My Unorthodox Life,' about the new season and much more.