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  • Published: 31 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141184852
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99

Seize the Day




"Bellow is one of the giants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why" San Francisco Examiner

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as 'the type that loses the girl') and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope ...

  • Published: 31 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141184852
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born in Canada but brought to Chicago at the age of nine and educated there. He attended the Universities of Chicago, Northwestern and Wisconsin as well as fitting in a wartime stint in the Merchant Marine.
His first novel - Dangling Man - was published when he was in his twenties. Later novels, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December and Him With His Foot In His Mouth And Other Stories have brought him innumerable literary grants, awards, prizes, scholarships, fellowships and honours not only in his own country but internationally as well. He is probably the only man to have received an Honorary Degree from both Harvard and Yale in the same year. He has also written plays, short stories, articles for learned journals, been a war correspondent in Israel and held positions in a number of universities in the United States and elsewhere. He speaks four or five languages and has travelled extensively.
In 1976 Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1984 President Mitterand made him a commander of the Legion of Honour.

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Praise for Seize the Day

Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist

John Updike

A profoundly true image of human existence . . . This is the intense world of the ordinary, about to burst forth into the radiance of consciousness

The New York Times

It is the special distinction of Mr. Bellow as a novelist that he is able to give us, step by step, the world we really live each day -- and in the same movement to show us that the real suffering of not understanding, the deprivation of light. It is this double gift that explains the unusual contribution he is making to our fiction

The New York Times

Saul Bellow was a brilliant man, a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments.

Ian McEwan

Bellow's pre-eminence rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see - sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches... Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James

Martin Amis

A small masterpiece...I enjoy Saul Bellow in his spreading carnivals and wonder at his energy

V.S. Pritchett

What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow's eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow's vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it

Chicago Times