Something to Remember Me By

Description

A trio of short works by the Nobel laureate and “greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century” (James Wood, The New Republic)

While Saul Bellow is known best for his longer fiction in award-winning novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, Something to Remember Me By will draw new readers to Bellow as it showcases his extraordinary gift for creating memorable characters within a smaller canvas.

The loss of a ring in A Theft helps an oft-married woman understand her own wisdom and capacity for love. In The Bellarosa Connection, Harry Fonstein has escaped from Nazi brutality with the help of an underground organization masterminded by the legendary Broadway impresario Billy Rose, and his story continues in America . In the title story, seventeen-year-old Louie—whose mother is dying of cancer—strays far from home and finds not solace but humiliation and, ultimately, the blessing of his father’s wrath.

This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Nicole Krauss.

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.

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“I think it A Work of Genius. I think it The Work of a Genius. I think it brilliant, splendid, etc. If there is literature (and this proves there is), this is where it’s at.”
— John Cheever

“Bellow’s incremental sound–or noise–rejects imitation the way the human immune system will reject foreign tissue. There are no part-Bellows or next-generation Bellows;  there are no literary descendants.”
— Cynthia Ozick

“Bellow’s special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon.”
— Philip Roth, The New Republic

“Saul Bellow is probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth-century–where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical. Reading Bellow is a special way of being alive.”
— James Wood, The New Republic

“No modern writer has better constructed this anxious and very serious comedy, more clearly defined the encounter between thought and the labyrinth, more exactly captured the strange Byzantine, parrot-filled meeting places of modern thought, modern heart, and modern silence.”
— Malcolm Bradbury, The Guardian

“Sharp, erudite, beautifully measured . . . [Bellow] is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world.”
— The Times (London)

“Bellow’s prose is poetic, wistful and ironic, rich in humor and packed with ideas . . . If William Faulkner was the most celebrated American novelist of the twentieth century’s first half, Saul Bellow has owned the second fifty years.”
— Chicago Sun-Times

“[Saul Bellow is] a powerful and elegant voice reminding us of the essential truths of our human nature.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Bellow is at home . . .in the hopeful humanism of the heart.”
— Chicago Tribune

Saul Bellow was praised for his vision, his ear for detail, his humor, and the masterful artistry of his prose. Born of Russian Jewish parents in Lachine, Quebec in 1915, he was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology, and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. During the Second World War he served in the Merchant Marines.

His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) are penetrating, Kafka-like psychological studies. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe, where he began his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March, which went on to win the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. His later books of fiction include Seize the Day (1956); Henderson the Rain King (1959); Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (1968); Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970); Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Dean’s December (1982); More Die of Heartbreak (1987); Theft (1988); The Bellarosa Connection (1989);The Actual (1996); Ravelstein (2000); and, most recently, Collected Stories(2001). Bellow has also produced a prolific amount of non-fiction, collected in To Jerusalem and Back, a personal and literary record of his sojourn in Israel during several months in 1975, and It All Adds Up, a collection of memoirs and essays.

Bellow’s many awards include the International Literary Prize for Herzog, for which he became the first American to receive the prize; the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by France to non-citizens; the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish Literature”; and America’s Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the first time this award has been made to a literary personage. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”

US

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