Best of 2010 ListsThe New York Times, Michiko Kakutaniandrsquo;s Top Ten of 2010
The Washington Post, John Yardleyandrsquo;s Best of 2010
Minneapolis Star Tribune
and#160;
andldquo;It comes as no surprise to find that the great novelist was a great correspondent as well. I hungrily read the book through in three nights, as though Iandrsquo;d stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed.andrdquo;
andmdash;Philip Roth
andldquo;In the Letters, as in everything he wrote, Saul Bellow never dipped below a certain levelandmdash;and that level is stratospheric.andrdquo;
andmdash;Martin Amis
andldquo;Saul Bellow: Letters is a treasure trove. Itandrsquo;s fascinating to see one of our great American writers take form.andrdquo;
andmdash;Nathan Englander
andldquo;Magnificentandhellip; The man is all here in this book, in his stunning, almost baffling plenitude. Bellowandrsquo;s letters are one of Bellowandrsquo;s greatest books. Benjamin Taylor records that it contains only two-fifths of what Bellow called his andldquo;epistling,andrdquo; but its riches are nonetheless immense. Taylor has selected and edited and annotated these letters with exquisite judgment and care. This is an elegantissimo book. Our literatureandrsquo;s debt to Taylor, if our culture still cares, is considerable.andrdquo;
andmdash;Leon Wieseltier, The New York Times Book Review
andldquo;Full of those wonderful vignettes that pepper his books, comic and perceptive at the same timeandhellip; Thereandrsquo;s so much going on here, such swift and impassioned dialogue between the spiritual and the physical, the place and those who inhabit it, that, as so often in his books, we can only gasp in joyful wonder.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Wall Street Journal
andldquo;Masterfully edit[ed].andrdquo;
andmdash;Vanity Fair
andldquo;A hefty, handsome volumeandhellip; Chatty yet polished, and always vibrant, Bellowandrsquo;s letters serve as the autobiography he never wrote.andrdquo;
andmdash;Los Angeles Times
andldquo;You must read this. If youandrsquo;re a lover of prose, someone who knows how to savor the taste of a scrumptious sentence, then youandrsquo;ll find morsels aplenty to set your eyes rolling to the back of your head in indecent pleasure.andrdquo;
andmdash;NPR
andldquo;Studded with brilliant passagesandhellip; Just as Bellowandrsquo;s novels teem with the turbulence of raw immediate experience burnished by the refinerandrsquo;s fires of insight, emotion, and style, his letters make clear that his life was the source of that connected fullness.andrdquo;
andmdash;The New Yorker
andldquo;A window into literary genius.andrdquo;
andmdash;London Review of Books
andldquo;Arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let goandhellip; Bellow is a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer. The Bellow that floats to the surface in this volume is a close spiritual relative of the heroes who populate his fiction: a seeker and searcher who also happens to be a first-class noticer; an intellectual, deep in what he once called andldquo;the profundity game,andrdquo; who is constantly trying to balance the equation between rumination and action, solipsism and distraction, the temptations of selfhood and the noise of the real world.andrdquo;
andmdash;Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
andldquo;Bellowandrsquo;s sheer brio, his occasional feuds and deep friendships, his unquenchable enthusiasm for being human, and his incomparable prose, make this collection of letters an absolute must for anyone who is remotely interested in American literature of the 20th century.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Financial Times
andldquo;Bellow was an exceptionally astute man. He was also formidably well-read, an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word but also a lover of pleasure in many forms. His collected letters are probably the last book we shall have from him, andandhellip; a very good one.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Washington Post
andldquo;Drollery, mordancy, tenderness, quick-draw portraiture, metaphysical vaudeville, soul talk, heart pains, the whole human messandmdash;Saul Bellowandrsquo;s letters are a Saul Bellow novel, the author himself the protagonist. A Saul Bellow novel! A gift from the grave, like Humboldtandrsquo;s. The great voice again, the peerless voice.andrdquo;
andmdash;William Deresiewicz, The Nation
andldquo;Reveal[s] Bellowandrsquo;s unfailingly high quality as a correspondentandhellip; Scarcely a letter in this volume is without an amusing phrase or arresting insight or interesting formulation.andrdquo;
andmdash;The New Criterion
andldquo;Feisty, smart, but most of all thrillingly intimate, these letters ripen and mature as they go along, just as some people do.andrdquo;
andmdash;Chicago Tribune
andldquo;These letters are rich in gossip, declarations of love and ambition, praise, criticism, and commiseration; the most touching among them are to the writers for whom he had tender feeling (John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever) and those who appealed to him for help (William Kennedy, Wright Morris).andrdquo;
andmdash;Bookforum
andldquo;So richly characteristic on every page. What makes Bellow rare, possibly unique, among the great writers of the past century was [his] conviction that seeing had a metaphysical warrant, that perception, and the recording of perception, was not a pastime but an andldquo;assignment.andrdquo;andrdquo;
andmdash;Adam Kirsch, The Times Literary Supplement
andldquo;The letters are all zest and craving and demandandmdash;so many journeys, so many cities, so many liaisons, so many courtings, so many marriages and partings, so many spasms of rage, so many victories and downers, so many blue or frenetic melancholias and grievances; but cumulatively they add up to a rich montage of knowing, speckled now and again with laughter, that most metaphysical of emotions.andrdquo;
andmdash;Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic
andldquo;The virtue of these letters is found in their compassion.andrdquo;
andmdash;Playboy
andldquo;Ben Taylorandrsquo;s meticulously edited and annotated volume of Bellowandrsquo;s letters provides the most intimate glimpse we have yet received of how this voice emerged. Bellowandrsquo;s language in letters, as in fiction, is stunning. His is an English both earnestly and adoringly cerebral and earthy, drawing on the cadences of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Hyde Park Trotskyism, the high-church intellectualism of the University of Chicago, and the guys and dolls patois of Damon Runyon.andrdquo;
andmdash;Jewish Review of Books
andldquo;Flecked with remarkable judgments on the people he knewandhellip; Bellowandrsquo;s letters reveal him as a restless, agitated truth-seeker, not unlike many of his characters.andrdquo;
andmdash;National Post
andldquo;These letters crackle with wit, often wicked and nonetheless satisfying for that.andrdquo;
andmdash;Commonweal Magazine
andldquo;Wonderfulandhellip; offers a strong salve to those who miss his familiar voice. Like the fiction, the missives can be brilliant, glistening, scathing, boring, funny, generous, probing and always genuinely human.andrdquo;
andmdash;Chicago Sun-Times
andldquo;A generous sampling of the literary judgments of a great writer, with private assessments of his own work as well as that of others.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Huffington Post
andldquo;Insightful and engagingandhellip; This elegant edition provide[s] new insight into the relationship between Bellowandrsquo;s life and his art.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Daily Beast
andldquo;Readers of Bellow will plunge into these letters eager to trace the making of a writer, and in this they will not be disappointed. Who, reading these letters, could not but love him? He was fearsome and kindly, tolerant and unforgiving, committed to his art but dedicated to the world. andldquo;I have,andrdquo; he wrote, andldquo;sophisticated skin and naandiuml;ve bones.andrdquo; There was no one to match him, nor will be again.andrdquo;
andmdash;John Banville, The Guardian (U.K.)
andldquo;Why not simply admit it? The new collection of Saul Bellowandrsquo;s andldquo;Lettersandrdquo; is a modern reliquary. It is a treasured remnant of the beloved wonderworker. And who are the followers, the faithful? Bookish cranks, mainly, plus unstoppable line-quoters, Jewish lit fetishists, passionate scholars, and the unclassifiable lovers of living books.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Forward
andldquo;Taylorandrsquo;s significant contribution constitutes the eloquent autobiography that Bellow never wrote.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Jewish Chronicle
andldquo;Thoughtful, eloquent, feisty. Benjamin Taylor has done a superb job in both his selection and his introduction to these salient letters from a gone world when literature was all the rage.andrdquo;
andmdash;Tablet Magazine
andldquo;Benjamin Taylorandrsquo;s introduction and frequent brief identifying notes are models of elegant scholarly restraint.andrdquo;
andmdash;Boston Globe
andldquo;He is a great describer, a whiz with metaphor, a humanist, a life-affirmer, a practitioner of philosophical laughter.andrdquo;
andmdash;The New York Observer
andldquo;[A] cracking new volumeandhellip; A principal pleasure in this chronological collection is the chronology itselfandmdash;in the joy of watching a big man of American letters grow into himself, reflexively and reflectively, in the course of composing letters.andrdquo;
andmdash;The American Scholar
andldquo;A cause for celebration.andrdquo;
andmdash;New Statesman
andldquo;Wise, honest and often very funnyandhellip; [This] may be the last of the great literary letter collections. Letters are often wrongly dismissed in the academy as worthless gossip, but the letters of great writers can be windows on to minds and social milieus once vibrant and alive, now long gone; arguments and issues from the past; literary craft; personal triumphs and tragedies; reminders of the teachings of Ecclesiastes (all is vanity); and insight into how smart people thought about peculiar situations in which they found themselves.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Second Pass
andldquo;A large and readable volumeandhellip; essential to understanding the literary situation of the mid- to late 20th century.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Denver Post
andldquo;At once an autobiographical portrait and a work of literature unto itselfandhellip; Brittle and brilliant as crystalandmdash;as prone to slice those who handled him as to dazzle those who gazed on from afarandmdash;Bellow attains that rare stature in which all that really matters is what is on the printed page. We no longer have him, but we will always have that.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Wilson Quarterly
andldquo;Everything you have heard and more, an essential text for any writer, aspiring or published.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Millions
andldquo;Reveal[s] the organic origins of the street-smart intellectual style that he first introduced in The Adventures of Augie March and perfected in Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King.andrdquo;
andmdash;The Christian Science Monitor
andldquo;Illuminatingandhellip; These arenandrsquo;t dashed-off notes, but letters that required considerable care and meant much to the author, as he expresses affection and support for other writers (Ellison, Roth, Malamud, Cheever, Amis et al.), takes critics and journalists to task with well-formed arguments and offers critical commentary on the culture that provides the context for his work.andrdquo;
andmdash;Kirkus
andldquo;Collected and annotated by Benjamin Taylor, these letters reveal in Saul Bellow a rare consistency: From the first letter in 1932 to the last in 2005, Bellowandrsquo;s ex-wives accrue, his fortunes rise and fall, but his characterandmdash;as a man generous and preoccupied by literatureandmdash;remains fixed.andrdquo;
andmdash;Time Out New York
andldquo;As entertaining, as infuriating, as tantalizing, as messy, as his novelsandhellip; a wonderfully complex portrait of a unique individual.andrdquo;
andmdash;Tulsa World
andldquo;The letters gathered here disclose a fertile mind harnessed to a febrile temperament.andrdquo;
andmdash;Library Journal
andldquo;A lot of fanfare has been made in anticipation of the release of Saul Bellow: Letters, and for good reason.andrdquo;
andmdash;Jewcy
andldquo;Taylorandrsquo;s book, like his subject, Naples, is a lot of things at once; there are lengthy discussions of history, philosophy, religion, art, culture, literature, customs.andnbsp; The book meanders between past and present, wanders in stream-of-thought fashion through the Naples streets, delves deeply into the cityandrsquo;s stories, lives, and lore, and drops in for conversations with locals; it is an accurate representation of what travel is and what it means.andnbsp; Scholarly and insightful and balanced with wit and levity, [Naples Declared] is written with an effortless poeticism.andrdquo;andmdash;Library Journal
andldquo;Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant biography.andrdquo;andmdash;Philip Roth
andldquo;Taylorandrsquo;s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proustandrsquo;s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.andrdquo;andmdash;Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzacandrsquo;s Omelette and Monsieur Proustandrsquo;s Library
andquot;A sensitive study of literatureand#39;s favorite neurasthenic . . . Readers of Proust will be fascinated to find clues as to who his characters were in real life, and they should be moved to appreciation by Taylorand#39;s assessment of Proustand#39;s accomplishment . . . A densely packed and rewarding book.andquot;andmdash;Kirkus Reviews
An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century