UNORIGINAL SIN Mar 16, 2008
Like urban male Jewish writers from Saul Bellow to Jonathan Lethem, Mansbach seems to be obsessed with black people, who offer (in his novelistic imagination) the ambiguous possibility of a more powerful, realer life. (This obsession penetrated at least one of Mansbach's other books, the satirical novel "Angry Black White Boy"). (New York Post -- Opinions)
From Assembly Line to Network at the Post Mar 15, 2008
Related in SlateIn 2005, Jack Shafer what unedited bloggers can teach edited reporters and, Elizabeth Sifton what it was like to edit Saul Bellow. is Slate's editor at large. (Slate)
'The Life of the Skies' Feb 29, 2008
Saul Bellow makes an appearance in two chapters, while the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird on the continent, gets just one. As a "key to modern birding," Rosen suggests reading "On the Road," "Lolita" and "Wild America.". (San Francisco Chronicle -- Entertainment)
REQUIRED READING Feb 24, 2008
In World War II, Jews fleeing the Nazis had few places to go - most countries would. the person who helped with wardrobe and styling had the NERVE to bring out an XS top. (New York Post -- Opinions)
Opinion: Based on what? Feb 21, 2008
Although, I never saw Saul Bellow described at the bottom of a piece as a New York-based writer. Elie Wiesel is not tagged as a Boston-based writer. (Brookline TAB, MA)
Rebirth of a dark genius Feb 17, 2008
It is easy to see why Yates so resented the success of contemporaries like Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth and John Cheever. In his last, illness-wracked years, Yates required a portable oxygen tank. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
'Boulevard' is set in prime real estate Feb 5, 2008
Langer set his first two books smart, intricately crafted novels inspired by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in Chicago. For this novel, subtitled A Novel in A-Flat, he's changed scenes without missing a beat. (USA Today -- Life)
A life of their own Jan 26, 2008
There is probably a basic distinction to be made between novelists such as Tolstoy or Trollope or Dickens, who seem unselfconsciously to create galleries of various people who are nothing like them, and those writers either less interested in or perhaps less naturally gifted at this faculty, but who nevertheless have a great deal of interest in the self - James, Flaubert, DH Lawrence, Saul Bellow, Roth, Michel Houellebecq. Iris Murdoch is the most poignant member of this second category,... (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Committee on Social Thought is renamed for founder, supporter Jan 25, 2008
Some of the country s leading intellectuals have been associated with the committee, including the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, political philosophers Alan Bloom and Hannah Arendt, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Von Hayek. The late Francois Furet, one of France s leading intellectuals, was a member of the committee as was John Coetzee, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. (Univeristy of Chicago Chronicle, IL)
CostaLiving: Cell phone novels generate false ring tones Jan 24, 2008
Call it something else, but don t place it in the category with Jane Austen or Saul Bellow. What they wrote were novels, not a travesty of thumbs. (Lincoln Journal, MA)
A face full of honey to make this film go down Jan 19, 2008
He's a novelist of the Saul Bellow and Normal Mailer age, now in his seventies with. a few moderately successful tomes behind him but a rather unpromising future; his current work has already taken him 10 years to write. (National Post)
A chase movie for grown-ups Jan 18, 2008
The protagonist is Leonard Schiller, a widower and once well-known novelist, a smaller satellite in the orbits of such Jewish-American literary giants of the 1950s and 1960s as Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. He's played by Frank Langella, a veteran stage and film actor who is probably still best known for the movie Dracula (1979). (Globe and Mail)
Exploring Jewish-America Jan 5, 2008
Jewish -and American / PBS series explores a people's rich, influential history, dating back to Colonial times, and profiles key modern figures. " Getting there, of course, was hardly a straight path. Grubin unearths various surprises. Did you know, for example, that it was a Jew who conceived and marketed the 10-gallon hat? Or that "The Goldbergs," a Bronx slice-of-life radio (and later television) series that premiered in 1929, was America's first sit-com? Or that the national circulation of... (San Francisco Chronicle -- Entertainment)
An intellectual insider, forever on the outside Jan 3, 2008
A proud Jew, and a champion of writers like Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he opposed the Zionist program in the 1940s and could speak with offhand contempt of Judaism, whose sole contribution to human thought, he wrote toward the end of his life, is "a summons to prayer, ritual and obedience.". Although a committed socialist, he refused the cultural role of "an armed intellectual," as he put it, and shrank from most of the ideological battles that consumed his contemporaries at... (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Book review: The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 2 Dec 27, 2007
Along with duller armchair bits by others, among them Saul Bellow and Robert Stone. Now a second set of 16 is out, not quite up to the first. (International Herald Tribune -- Arts)
Creative assistance Dec 24, 2007
Bellow, the 43-year-old son of author Saul Bellow, knows how hard it is to earn a living as an artist. He sells real estate to supplement his income as a potter. (Boston Globe)
'Last Night at the Lobster' Dec 21, 2007
" "I've always loved reading," he said " Saul Bellow said that a writer is simply a reader moved to emulation, and that's true in my case ... " "I've always loved reading," he said " Saul Bellow said that a writer is simply a reader moved to emulation, and that's true in my case. (West Hartford News, CT)
Pankaj Mishra: Confront the clichs Dec 10, 2007
This Nabokovian jauntiness co-exists uneasily with the world-historical seriousness Amis adopted from Saul Bellow that, when combined with a patchy knowledge of world history and some primordial anxiety about cultural otherness, results in some pretty incoherent political postures. The question "Why take Martin Amis seriously?" has kept many dissenters uneasily passive. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Linda Hall: A literary life well lived Dec 6, 2007
I have sat through panel discussions on Saul Bellow that became lively debates about Israel and Edward Said. Elizabeth Hardwick had her politics - and a good mind for history, too - but she was, like Henry James, a being organised for literature. (Guardian Unlimited -- Books)
Wanted: "A Five-Cent Synthesis" Dec 5, 2007
Saul Bellow, in a preface to Bloom's book, writes that the university has become a "conceptual warehouse" of harmful influences rather than a place for free inquiry ... Saul Bellow, in a preface to Bloom's book, writes that the university has become a "conceptual warehouse" of harmful influences rather than a place for free inquiry. (Townhall.com)
Elizabeth Hardwick, Kentucky-born author Dec 5, 2007
It published many influential pieces, including Susan Sontag's essay on photography and Gore Vidal's appreciation of Dawn Powell, although some criticized the magazine as clannish and elitist, with Saul Bellow referring to it as The New York Review of "each other's books.". Hardwick was born in Lexington, Ky. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Powell's turns the page Dec 3, 2007
"I'm at heart a pretty shy guy," said Powell, who launched the first Powell's in Chicago while a political science graduate student at the University of Chicago with a $3,000 loan that came from several faculty members, including Saul Bellow. "I'm not a glad-hander." He is into noir novels set in other countries, and you can see his brooding temperament enjoying heroes such as Henning Mankell's soulful detective or Alan Furst's elegant, elusive spies. (Los Angeles Times)
Musharraf: The Tolstoy of the Zulus Nov 27, 2007
As Saul Bellow rhetorically said of multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?". Pakistan is a country where local Islamic courts order women to be raped as punishment for the crimes of their male relatives. (Human Events Online)
"Starting Out in the Evening" Nov 23, 2007
He's the kind of old-style writer, in the mold of Saul Bellow and (in his dedication to toil, at least) Norman Mailer, that was already becoming a dying breed when Morton's novel was published. Today -- particularly after the death of Mailer -- these men are even scarcer on the landscape, which gives the story a sharper edge of poignancy. (Salon)
A Thanksgiving Bear? Nov 22, 2007
asd Doug Fabian's Making Money Alert. Making Money Alert Current Issue. (Human Events Online)
Mailer knew his way around sentence structure Nov 19, 2007
If he didn't rise above them all to take his place with Faulkner, Dostoevski and Tolstoy, as he at one time envisioned himself doing, he was at the very least right in there with the best of his contemporaries who include, after all, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike and two particular thorns in Mailer's tough, scarred hide: Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. But after charging onto the literary landscape with The Naked and the Dead (1948), his bold, brash,... (San Diego Union-Tribune)
Fulford: The failed career of Norman Mailer Nov 12, 2007
Near the start of his career Norman Mailer declared that he planned to write the great American novel, "hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters.'' It was a typically American goal, stated in baseball language, but it severely damaged him. Having set an impossible standard, he spent a lifetime fruitlessly trying to meet it, and when he died on Saturday, at age 84, "the big one" (as he sometimes called it) was still beyond his grasp.His first... (National Post)
IN MY LIBRARY Nov 11, 2007
" But then, what would Italian cinema and American literature be without God? Monda talks with Salman Rushdie, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Saul Bellow and others about the nature of the divine, inspired by a quote from philosopher Jean Guitton: The question about the existence of God is the element hidden behind every conversation.". On Nov. 19, Monda will be leading a discussion with Paula Fox, Nathan Englander, Paul Auster and Colum McCann at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. (New York Post -- Opinions)
Norman Mailer's life and legacy Nov 11, 2007
He had survived his contemporaries -- James Jones, William Styron, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud -- despite a reckless life that not only included drinking and womanizing, but also a pugnacious boxer's stance that invited verbal and physical attacks. Cause of death was kidney failure. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PA)
Radio host Michael Krasny opens up in 'Off Mike' Nov 5, 2007
Ever self-critical, Krasny is ambivalent about his accomplishments: "I am a learned man and literary figure of sorts. I am also a public intellectual and maestro for educated radio listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. ... I'm the inverse of Saul Bellow, who said that he was a bird and not an ornithologist.". Krasny agonizes over not having achieved the great dream of his youth - to become "a respected and valued author." Now, arguably, he has achieved with nonfiction what he... (San Francisco Chronicle)
Rosalitas Puppets perform "The Haunted Woods" at the library Oct 24, 2007
Read The Mosquito Coast On Monday, Oct. 29, at 7:15 p.m., a group will meet at the West Branch Library at 40 College Ave. to discuss Humboldt s Gift by Saul Bellow. At its next meeting, on Nov. 26, the group will discuss The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. (Somerville Journal, MA)
The Complete Stories Oct 22, 2007
Towards the end of his life, Saul Bellow said that every fiction he read had one fault in common: they could have been shorter. David Malouf has said the same kind of thing. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Ghostwriter resurrects 'lost' love story by historical novelist Michener Oct 15, 2007
"He doesn't think Michener felt bad about using ghostwriters. Because the author grew up in a poorhouse, Michener was quick to take paying gigs such as magazine articles, even if it meant hiring help to write them.Bortz says hiring a ghostwriter was "the nature of the business" for Michener."He wasn't a literary writer in the sense of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, those types of guys," Bortz says. "He had to do an intense amount of historical research to sort of shape these massive stories. I don't... (Florida Today)
A life in writing Sep 29, 2007
" But he was encouraged by both Abravanel and EI Lonoff, the self-effacing short story writer, whose home in western Massachusetts he visited in December 1956. This was a momentous year for Zuckerman. The Saturday Review accepted his story "Higher Education", singling him out as a promising young writer. Less happily, the story, which drew on a family dispute, caused a rift with his father and disquieted some community leaders, one of whom, Judge Leopold Wapter, insinuated that it would warm the... (Guardian Unlimited)
Creative Destruction Vs. The New Industrial State Sep 19, 2007
Saul Bellow said of his youthful Trotskyism, "Like everyone else who invests in doctrines at a young age, I couldn't give them up." A young adult hates the bourgeoisie or loves capitalism or believes passionately in the welfare state. Her politics becomes a cherished identity, a faith. (Disinformation)
Sebastian Faulks Returns With 'Engleby' Sep 15, 2007
He says American novelists such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike "look at the world around them and it has a kind of natural gravity." Their characters "seem to be people who feel the weight of the world and history in their veins." But modern British fiction "doesn't have the same sort of gravity," said Faulks, a tall, bearded writer with a mop of curly red-blond hair. "It's something to do with British self-mockery.". (Newsmax)
His life is an open book he mines for laughs Sep 7, 2007
"It doesn't matter whether it's Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce or Saul Bellow or John Updike or Toni Morrison," he says. "All of those people are saying, 'Dude, life is difficult and crazy and complicated and I know it and my characters know it and they're living it, and you will feel less alone with your mishegas [craziness] . . . if you plug into that.' ". (Boston Globe)
What to do with brick-sized Vogue? Sep 3, 2007
Rip out the Dolce na Page of Smell before you get on a bus, though, otherwise fellow passengers might question the availability of scratch'n'sniff editions of Saul Bellow. In Martin Amis's The Information, Richard Tull ("anti-hero") plays a "hilarious" prank on his nemesis by sending him a copy of the LA Times anonymously, saying "wonderful review", knowing that the paper is so huge, and the man is so vain, he will waste all of Sunday combing through it. (Guardian Unlimited)
The elegant assassin Aug 26, 2007
Shortly after Harvard hired Wood, members of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought -- Saul Bellow's onetime home -- approached him to apply for a position that could have led to lifetime tenure ... Wood lauded Saul Bellow as an ideal, and championed the lesser-known writers W.G. Sebald, Norman Rush, and Alan Hollinghurst. (Boston Globe)
Let the Cleavage Conversation Begin... Jul 28, 2007
Today's Top Political Stories. Says fundraising and campaigning will conflict; cites lack of "respectfulness" of format. (The Drudge Report)
Leonard Michaels -- let us not forget him Jul 2, 2007
The byproduct of a generation of Jewish American postwar writers including such disparate sensibilities as Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Saul Bellow and, one could argue, even Woody Allen, Michaels rose to prominence with the excellent short story collection "Going Places,'' and the famously misogynistic novel "The Men's Club. . (San Francisco Chronicle)
Theatre of the absurd Jun 30, 2007
But there hadn't been anything about being Russian," he says. The novel landed to ecstatic reviews but not tremendous sales. New York's legendarily harsh critic Michiko Kakutani praised the book for its energy and wit and a brilliant use of language. She compared Shteyngart to one of his early heroes, Saul Bellow. "At the time I was writing that, I was just discovering Bellow and Roth and Nabakov," Shteyngart says. Absurdistan, however, was an event when it was published in the US last year. The... (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Russian revolution Jun 29, 2007
Absurdistan is Shteyngart's second novel, following on from his lavishly well-received The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which earned him comparisons to Kingsley and Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller and Nabokov. He also recently took his place in Granta's list of best young American novelists, alongside those other rising stars of the New York literary scene, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. (Guardian Unlimited)
Meanwhile: Dreaming of electric sheep Jun 12, 2007
The rehabilitation hit a literary high note earlier this month, when the Library of America issued "Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s," which placed him in the company of Henry James, Saul Bellow, Faulkner and other heavyweights. Dick wrote his share of bad novels, which is hardly surprising given that he wrote stoked up on drugs and suffered no end of paranoid delusions. (International Herald Tribune -- Ed/Op)
Writer's Paradise Jun 7, 2007
William Faulkner, Galway Kinnell, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas-Llosa, Saul Bellow, Dashiell Hammett, John O'Hara some of the greatest writers of all time have lived and worked in Princeton at one point or another during their belletristic careers. Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, W.S. Merwin, Geoffrey Wolff and so many others have made Princeton the literary epicenter it is. (Manville News, NJ)
'Bang the Drum Slowly' author dead Jun 5, 2007
His nonfiction books included "City of Discontent: An Interpretive Biography of Vachel Lindsay," "Mark the Glove Boy, or The Last Days of Richard Nixon," and "Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck.". Harris taught in the English departments at the University of Minnesota, San Francisco State University, Purdue University, California Institute of the Arts, University of Southern California and the University of Pittsburgh. (CNN -- Showbiz)
A masterful biography captures complexity of Ellison's art and ideas Jun 5, 2007
That year marked the beginning of his ascent to national prominence, and the consolidation of his status as a cosmopolitan, certified "New York Intellectual," who numbered among his friends Stanley Edgar Hyman , Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and John Cheever. Honors followed: a Prix de Rome fellowship; numerous teaching and lecturing offers; membership in the prestigious Century Association; election to the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters; the... (Boston Globe)
Mark Harris, author of 'Bang the Drum Slowly,' dies at 84 Jun 1, 2007
Among his nonfiction books are "City of Discontent: An Interpretive Biography of Vachel Lindsay," "Mark the Glove Boy, or The Last Days of Richard Nixon," and "Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck.". Harris was a professor of English at Arizona State University at Tempe, where he also taught creative writing, from 1980 to 2001. (Los Angeles Times)
Sydney Writers' Festival opening night address May 31, 2007
For their love of argument and their vivid passion for the soul, Saul Bellow and Joseph Brodsky and Gunter Grass and David Malouf and Seamus Heaney are the news that stays news. The hundreds of writers here in Sydney this week are busy each with the news that stays news. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Decline and fall of the neocons May 20, 2007
As Tony Blair was bidding farewell to President George W Bush in the Rose Garden on Thursday, the World Bank was preparing to kick out Paul Wolfowitz as president. Allies to the left and right in the Iraq war were falling by the wayside that day. (Times Online)
The end of innocence May 19, 2007
"Our American world," Saul Bellow once wrote, "is a prodigy" where, "on the material level, the perennial dreams of mankind have been realised." This was - and is - only partly true, as James Baldwin's work would attest. But it is what many Americans believed, which meant that ideas and ideologies of the kind that bloomed in straitened Europe in the 1920s and 30s faded quickly in America, and American novelists remained largely indifferent to the machinery of social and political power. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
On a quest for America's soul May 14, 2007
Bob is reading "Herzog" by Saul Bellow, "Shaved Fish" by Susan Geason, "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" by Mark Bittner and "Wodehouse on Crime" by P.G. Wodehouse). My yoga mat. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
Ralph Ellison: An invisible man no more May 10, 2007
Friends with Saul Bellow, John Cheever and William Styron, Ellison moved in the most elite circles of American life the White House, Manhattan's Century Club, philanthropic boards until his death in 1994. "He had an Olympian reputation," says Rampersad. (USA Today -- Life)
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 Apr 24, 2007
Saul Bellow took his intervention very seriously, refusing to answer certain types of questions and rewriting the text for days. The result is erudite but earnest, enlivened by a few great lines such as, "I often feel about Fitzgerald that he couldn't distinguish between innocence and social climbing.". (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Canadians rule on international Booker prize list Apr 14, 2007
(Unless, that is, one deems another candidate, Saul Bellow, to be Canadian because he lived for his first nine years in Quebec. . (Globe and Mail)
John Travolta Won't Do 'Today' for 'Hairspray' Apr 13, 2007
He was perhaps the last torchbearer of post-World War II literature that included his friends Joseph Heller, William Styron, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and James Jones. They were the literary lions, the greats, faces so well-known that they are reproduced on coffee mugs and bookmarks not because of commercial appeal, but because of their incredible influence on generations of readers. (Fox News -- Views)
So It Goes For Vonnegut Apr 13, 2007
His books are often pigeonholed as "too popular" or "too easy," he says, and there are few college courses that treat his work with the weight conferred upon contemporaries such as John Updike and Saul Bellow. But for all those at Smith who may scoff at his work, this is also a man who has charmed readers by making them laugh about horrors like the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. (Boston Globe)
The Wit and Wisdom of Don Imus: Apr 13, 2007
"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was ." (The homosexuality of the author of became widely known when Saul Bellow published , a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased. . (Slate)
Taking Names Apr 11, 2007
Previous PEN/Malamud Award winners include John Updike, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Stuart Dybek and William Maxwell, Joyce Carol Oates, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ann Beattie, Nathan Englander, Tobias Wolff and Adam Haslett. Wild' founder jailed Joe Francis, founder of the infamous "Girls Gone Wild" video empire, was taken into custody by federal marshals in Florida yesterday to face a contempt-of-court citation after initially defying a federal judge, APreports. (Washington Times, DC)
On Chesil Beach Apr 7, 2007
Whether penning an elegy for a deceased author like Saul Bellow or speaking with deep ambivalence about the Iraq War, he remains committed to the engaged notion of a public intellectual. And yet there's a provocative, almost mathematical coolness to his writing that undercuts the comforting status of a literary good guy. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
Saul Bellow and the Bad Fish: Apr 4, 2007
Saul Bellow and the bad fish. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine. (Slate)
Another view of Rosie Apr 2, 2007
Roth wins PEN/Bellow nod Philip Roth (inset) will receive the first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth's closest friends and literary heroes. "To my mind, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner form the backbone of 20th-century American literature," Roth said in a statement. (Boston Globe -- Living)
Author Philip Roth wins Saul Bellow Award Apr 2, 2007
NEW YORK (AP) Literary awards are old news for Philip Roth, but his latest honor is truly special: The first ever PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth's closest friends and literary heroes. "To my mind, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner form the backbone of 20th-century American literature," Roth said in a statement given to The Associated Press ... "I make this claim not only because of my admiration for its... (USA Today -- Life)
Elmore Leonard at Music Hall Mar 14, 2007
Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard. Martin Amis. (Seacoast New Hampshire)
To Russia, but not with love Feb 27, 2007
Enter the city, then press Submit. Visit the to get the latest temperatures. (Globe and Mail)
