Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers. For more than sixty years he has stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Now collected for the first time in one volume and chosen by the author himself are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," "Leaving the Yellow House," and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence." With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. This is a volume to treasure for longtime Bellow fans, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Saul Bellow's Collected Stories, handpicked by the author, display the depth of character and acumen of the Nobel laureate's narrative powers. While he has garnered acclaim as a novelist, Bellow's shorter works prove equally strong. Primarily set in a sepia-toned Chicago, characters (mostly men) deal with family issues, desires, memories, and failings--often arriving at humorous if not comic situations. In the process, these quirky and wholly real characters examine human nature. The narrative is straightforward, with deftly handled shifts in time, and the prose is concise, sometimes pithy, with equal parts humor and grace. In "Looking for Mr. Green," Bellow describes a relief worker sized up by tenants: "They must have realized that he was not a college boy employed afternoons by a bill collector, trying foxily to pass for a relief clerk, recognized that he was an older man who knew himself what need was, who had more than an average seasoning in hardship. It was evident enough if you looked at the marks under his eyes and at the sides of his mouth." This collection should appeal both to those familiar with Bellow's work and to those seeking an introduction. --Michael Ferch --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly This collection of 13 of Bellow's (long) short stories, many of them classics, demonstrates the Nobel Prize winner's formidable literary presence. His characters have prospered in the American century, and now, in their old age, are beginning to doubt its endurance. Bellow likes to take a man at "the top of his field" and, from that perspective, survey the discontents of civilization. Some - like Victor Wulpy in "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" - refuse to retire and take mistresses in their mid-70s. Others, like Willis Mosby, the foreign relations guru writing his mandarin's memoirs in Oaxaca, consider retirement another chance to score points. Bellow's women still rise to the top as they did in the 1950s - by association with men. In "A Theft," Clara Velde, who has successfully formed her own journalism agency, still defines herself in terms of her husbands. Generally, these interior dramas are saturated with the realistic and metaphorical atmosphere of Chicago. Yet the crowning jewel here is "The Bellarosa Connection," in which the unnamed narrator is a retired Philadelphia memory expert who reflects on his friendship with a man still obsessed with his escape from WWII Europe and the legendary showbiz promoter who helped him. Bellow's stories spread rather than march in straight lines, like memory itself, giving a kinesthetic sense of a stained, bamboozled and fundamentally comic culture. A preface by the writer's wife, Janis, an introduction by essayist James Woods and an afterword by Bellow himself, in which he makes a prescient case for short fiction in this time of "noisy frantic monstrous agglomeration," add to the collection's appeal. (Nov. 1). Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.