“... do you stop being who you are?For Peter Pan, death was an awfully big adventure. For Saul Bellow, it was the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.‘Nothing good ever really dies,’ a middle-aged man told me in the drinks queue at Abba Voyage in Stratford. ‘It just comes back stronger.’ It was a Thursday ...”

“... But then Updike, it is also said, is not quite a highbrow novelist – not in the sense that, say, Saul Bellow might believe himself to be, or even Gore Vidal. Vidal, all too predictably, sneers at Updike as a middlebrow provincial, by which he seems to mean that Updike timorously fails to stride forward as a global sage, or as a ‘custodian’ of ...”

“... as exciting, important and innovative as that of any previous period.’ A shared perception of Bellow, Pynchon, Orton, Heaney, Fowles and Vonnegut as men of the moment or at least of the decade gives a common tone to the critiques of Bradbury and his team, and the slim volumes of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series interact as the chapters of the Pelican ...”

“... and avocado: ‘he may have been on a green diet but he hadn’t stopped drinking blood,’ Saul Bellow said recalling the occasion. The epithets women use are ‘capricious’, ‘captivating’ and ‘childlike’. Singer had a harem of translators, admirers, groupies and muses: Hadda notes the ‘fascinating but implausible fact that Bashevis ...”

“... of adultery in Western literature.’ (Here I was reminded of a Chicago student who once asked Saul Bellow, ‘Can’t you have a novel without adultery?’ to which Bellow replied: ‘Can you have a circus without elephants?’) As Garber nicely sums up the situation, ‘the shortest distance between two points is ...”

“... in bed with the door locked and the curtains drawn, eating pilchards from the tin while reading Saul Bellow and Nadine Gordimer, restocking addictively on books at a second-hand bookshop. Although his degree is a dead end, he finds his stay in South Africa, in the aftermath of apartheid, liberating. Throughout the book the political context is handled ...”

“... recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of ...”

“... of temporary appointments at American and Canadian universities. In the 1970s he was consulted by Saul Bellow, whose Humboldt’s Gift ‘teemed with Anthroposophical musings’. Bellow met Barfield and took reading suggestions from him. The relationship foundered, however, when Barfield reviewed The Dean’s December ...”

“... Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the decade. A ...”

“... Fury (2001), was an outsider’s view of New York – which begins in superficial imitation of Saul Bellow (ex-wives, big ideas, trying to read the city and the times) and ends in God knows what (serial killers, puppets, ethnic strife in the South Pacific etc). Even Rushdie’s best work has always divided its readers. Like Rashid Khalifa, the ...”

“... remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black ...”

“... Blackwood was ‘another casualty’. The writers among them were opportunists. Hochman slept with Saul Bellow to get ahead, and pursued the ‘pattern’ with Lowell. Hardwick, who had previously ‘advanced her literary career by sleeping with’ Philip Rahv and Tate, ‘climbed higher than she had ever dreamed’ by marrying Lowell, who ‘could do a ...”

“... way to the nearest sharp object, even in the dark. ‘Not to fall asleep is distinguished,’ Saul Bellow said long ago, in Humboldt’s Gift. Now, to yell is the mark of a hero. The contemporary heroine is a yeller, or at least threatens us with her yell. And, covering the middle ground of the book, stretched between Silent Yeller and Distant ...”

“... extraordinary circle of friends, including Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, that Berryman gathered at this period. Berryman’s life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother then married the family lodger, a man ...”

“... agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see how it might well have needed expression in ...”