Sublime

I was greatly affected by Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift,

Perhaps the sense of magic lay in the unexpected transformations. "You start Saul, and end up Paul,"

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

The lower shelves were where I kept the paperbacks I figured I’d never read again. The names on the spines, Herman Hesse, Raymond Radiguet, and Kyusaku Yumeno, had all faded in the sun. Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, and my Dostoyevsky, The Gambler, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov. Chekhov, Camus, Steinbeck. The Odyssey

“A comic book novel,” Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and movin

His gallantry reliably extends to whatever is disadvantaged, homely, long-suffering, foreign or feminine. Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be av