Mosby's Memoirs And Other Stories: Leaving the Yellow House; the Old System; Looking For Mr.Green; the Gonzaga Manuscripts; a Father-to-be; Mosby's Memoirs (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) - Softcover

Bellow, Saul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140189459 ISBN 13: 9780140189452

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1996

Synopsis

"What Henry James did for the geographically disoriented, Bellow does for the culturally traumatized in the six stories gathered in this collection. Truly, Bellow is one of God's spies." -Los Angeles Times A Penguin Classic In six darkly comic tales, Saul Bellow presents the human experience in all its preposterousness, poignancy, and pathos. In the title story, a professor well-known for his wit struggles to animate his memoirs as he teeters on the brink of despair; in "the old System," a distinguished biochemist tries to find room in his life for love; and in "A Father to Be," a man is startled to find himself seated next to his future adult son on a New York subway. The other stories, too, reflect Bellow's special ability to depict men and women confronting, in highly idiosyncratic ways, the enigmas and oddities of existence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

Review:

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"Darkly funny...taut, compressed, with splendid dialogue" -The Sunday times (London)

About the Author:

Saul Bellow was born in 1915 to Russian emigre parents. As a young child in Chicago, Bellow was raised on books - the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Chekhov - and learned Hebrew and Yiddish. He set his heart on becoming a writer after reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, contrary to his mother's hopes that he would become a rabbi or a concert violinist. He was educated at the University of Chicago and North-Western University, graduating in Anthropology and Sociology; he then went on to work for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bellow published his first novel, The Dangling Man, in 1944; this was followed, in 1947, by The Victim. In 1948 a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Bellow to travel to Paris, where he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. Henderson The Rain King (1959) brought Bellow worldwide fame, and in 1964, his best-known novel, Herzog, was published and immediately lauded as a masterpiece, 'a well-nigh faultless novel' (New Yorker). Saul Bellow's dazzling career as a novelist was celebrated during his lifetime with an unprecedented array of literary prizes and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Gold Medal for the Novel. In 1976 he was awarded a Nobel Prize 'for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work'. Bellow's death in 2005 was met with tribute from writers and critics around the world, including James Wood, who praised 'the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140189459
• ISBN 13: 9780140189452
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192