Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (Library of America)
Brit Lit Blogs (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
It took me a few weeks to read Blake Bailey’s exhaustive and exhausting (770 pages tip to tail) biography of John Cheever. Living with Cheever even for a month was no picnic: as his wife or children would tell you. He was a depressive, conflicted alcoholic, notably “enchained within the prison of self” even for a writer: when his children read some of the thousands of pages of his...
Mirror.co.uk (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Always among the most cerebral of managers, Fulham's Roy Hodgson has excelled himself by issuing a list of his top 10 favourite novels which includes heavyweight authors like Milan Kundera, Herman Hesse, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Katie Price (one of these names is not correct).It must be a relief to Roy that Liam Rosenior moved on shortly before he arrived at Craven Cottage, having just named his...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
I've just finished Herzog - a book that I meant to read five years ago. Let me begin by stating the obvious: this is a masterful novel. Narrative ingenuity, philosophical insight, cultural mayhem - it's all there, served with consistent (but always animated) prose. I must say, there's something about Bellow's novels which seem to outlast those of Roth. Maybe it's the writing itself which is superior;...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
What, apart from being dead and, in their different ways, remarkable, do the following authors have in common: Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Janet Frame, Allen Ginsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, Yukio Mishima, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Hunter S Thompson, John Updike, Evelyn Waugh... and Vladimir Nabokov?...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
We launch our search for the best books of the decade in the year of White Teeth, The Amber Spyglass and No Logo, but what was your favourite book from 2000? It's still a whole month-and-a-half until the credit-crunched, globally-warmed, genetically-modified noughties take their final bow, but already you can't turn around without tripping over a books-of-the-decade list. The Guardian Review will...
Cultural Offering.com (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Sol Sternberg has a great education article at City Journal about E.D. HIrsch's Cultural Literacy movement - the concept that early in schooling, children need to understand certain Core Knowledge subjects (that the education establishment positively hates): "For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson,Emily...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
Roy Hodgson on managing levels of expectation at Fulham and his position as a potential successor to Fabio Capello Roy Hodgson has just finished the Philip Roth novella Indignation , the title of which might describe the Premier League's favourite emotional state. Fulham's manager admits he can lose his rag with the best of them, but has 33 years of experience in club and international coaching to...
Skippers Chippers (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
AN AUTUMN SYMPOSIUM: TFC LIVE AT PIANOS TOMORROW NIGHT One last reminder that we're playing the first in a two show series tomorrow night at Pianos. If you go, you'll see a band that includes Marc Dalio on drums, Rich Stein on percussion, Rob Jost on bass, Matt Ray on keys, Noah Lebenzon on guitbox, Flavio Gaete on viola, Katie Scheele on woodwinds, Stan Harrison on sax and flute, Clark Gayton on sackbut,...
The Guardian Books Blog (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
It's sobering to think about how small the world of American letters will look without him Despite having two novels coming out in the next 18 months , the memorialisation of Philip Roth has already begun. The towering American novelist has recently had his works published by the Library of America, giving him an immortal status usually reserved for dead authors. At age 76, his birthdays are now "...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
In 1985, Primo Levi was known in Britain and America for a single book, If This is a Man, his memoir of survival in Auschwitz. Then came The Periodic Table, which arrived in this country garlanded with eulogies from Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
London Film Festival The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career. Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
When Sufjan Stevens was asked to write a symphony for New York, he turned to a hated freeway for inspiration. The musician tells Andrew Purcell why The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a miserable stretch of road. The BQE, as New Yorkers call it, has narrow lanes, no hard shoulder, countless potholes, and is usually one long traffic jam. As sources of artistic inspiration go, it's an unlikely one;...
NarcissusWorks (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
from the forward by Saul Bellow: I was soon aware that in the view of advanced European Thinkers, the cultural expectations of a young man from Chicago, that center of brutal materialism, were bound to be disappointed. Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards, the primitive bungalows of the industrial villages that comprised the city, the gloom of the financial district,...
The Aristocrats (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
I'm just 82 pages into " Amateur Barbarians" and I had to come in here and tell you, Robert Cohen is a great writer. best I've happened upon in a loooong while. the book cover tells me this: "Robert Cohen was touted by the New York Times Book Review as "the heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."" and the urbane and articulate Sandy Underpants says "fuck yeah"....
Hitchens Watch (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
Earlier tonight, I went to see Gore Vidal interviewed by Jay Parini at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Vidal is promoting a new book ( Snapshots in History's Glare ) that celebrates his life through a series of photos and old letters (many previously unreleased). GV was surprisingly alert, but then again my expectations weren't very high, given how old and crippled the man is. I didn't realize...
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