Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam discusses his new novel, That Kind of Mother, the limits of the employer-employee relationship, and the grossness of heterosexual sex.
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Posts Tagged: saul bellow
Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
Ratika Kapur discusses her latest book, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, the disappointing romance of affairs, and how people carry on after doing the unthinkable.
...moreBetter Read Saul
Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. At The Daily Beast, Michael Weiss writes a long and thoughtful essay on Saul Bellow and his often overlooked current cultural relevance.
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie Liontas
Annie Liontas talks about her debut novel Let Me Explain You, crafting voices, and the benefits—and occasional pitfalls—of returning to get an MFA after years of writing in the dark.
...moreThe Academic as (Insufferable) Hero
Cagey and brainy, Bellow wanted to be the novelist of both the streets and the faculty lounge. Alas, in too much of his work, he serves as a cautionary tale of how schools can open minds but can also sometimes trap the soul. Jeet Heer, over at The New Republic, offers us a profile of […]
...moreAn Interview with James Wood
Over at Electric Literature, Steve Paulson interviews legendary literary critic James Wood, who comments on a variety of subjects: what makes a good critic; the plight of reading widely in our contemporary age; literature as analogous to religion; genre fiction; his friendship with the aging Saul Bellow. A very lovely interview filled with literary appreciation, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Daniel Torday
Dan Torday talks about his novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West, the role of fear in fiction, the fabrication of facts in a memoir, and about being “constitutionally unoffendable.”
...moreThe Battle for Reputation
In anticipation of Zachary Leder’s upcoming biography, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, Lee Siegel grapples with the author’s tainted and troubling reputation for Vulture.
...moreA Century of Saul Bellow
I think of myself as a working stiff. If I got up in the morning, and say to myself ‘Well, great writer, what are you going to do today?’ I’d be paralyzed. To celebrate his 100th birthday, NPR takes a look at the life and writing of Saul Bellow.
...moreGary Shteyngart on the Feast of Ravelstein
When I assign Herzog to my students, I am essentially bringing a slab of foie gras to a vegan party. While author Gary Shteyngart won’t blurb your book, he did agree to write a new introduction to Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein. In his own vivid prose, Shteyngart savors the delectable difficulty of Bellow’s writing, muses on […]
...moreWhere We’re Going, Where We’ve Been
Literary Hub has posted a gem of an essay from Saul Bellow; he riffs on literary tropes, the trajectory of the novel, and how, even if it’s gotten close, it’s never actually dying: We know that science has a future, we hope that government will have one. But it is not altogether agreed that the novel has […]
...moreBellow’s Back
Simultaneously divisive and overlooked, Saul Bellow’s work has produced both fervent supporters and detractors while alienating many younger readers. This spring, a new biography by Zachary Leader will bring the late author back into the conversation. Vulture‘s Lee Siegel reflects on the strengths and shortcomings of a writer whose political incorrectness was matched only by […]
...moreSaul Bellows Revived
Saul Bellow’s 1978 story “A Silver Dish“ has been has been re-released over at the New Yorker. The piece follows Woody Seblst, a successful businessman, before abandoning its conventional plot structure entirely; Bellow’s prose seeps into the Great Depression, the rise of gateway psychedelics, and Woody’s bleeding relationship with a “dying and picturesque father”: There were […]
...moreEvaluating Books One Pie Chart at A Time
Sometimes exegesis of a literary text just isn’t colorful enough. That’s when you break out the pie charts. Publishers Weekly‘s news blog, PWxyz, has an ongoing feature that slices canonical works of fiction into easily understandable visual representations of data. The latest book on the cutting board is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. “Identity” takes […]
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”
I’ve been hearing the short story is dead again. The real money is in novels. Screenplays! A short story? Why don’t you go and write a haiku while you’re at it.
...moreDon’t Get Me Down: Reading and Writing Depression
In September 2008, David Foster Wallace stepped out onto his patio and did what most of us occasionally imagine doing, but hopefully never go through with.
...moreHerbert Gold on Saul Bellow, Extracted from Pushcart XXXII
The last few days, I’ve been boxing up some of my books in preparation to donate them to a good cause, about which more will be said when the appropriate time comes. Among these books are nine editions of The Pushcart Prize, which I’ve been buying and reading in part every year since 2000. (I […]
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