Seize The Day

“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 Sun-Times 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 cast 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…. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Cynthia Ozick.For more than seventy years Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1700 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. Review 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 TimesWhat makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellows 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 Bellows vision his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to see beyond it ―Chicago TimesA small masterpiece...I enjoy Saul Bellow in his spreading carnivals and wonder at his energy -- V.S. PritchettBellows 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 AmisSaul Bellow was a brilliant man a master of English prose and supreme chronicler of modernity and its torments. -- Ian McEwanIt 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 TimesSaul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist -- John Updike About the Author 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 Bachelors 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); Mosbys Memoirs and Other Stori