Most Popular Books by Saul Bellow

Profundamente introspectiva y conmovedora, el premio Nobel Saul Bellow nos sorprende con una novela valiente, oscura y desoladamente divertida: una elegía a la amistad y a la vida. Abe Ravelstein es un profesor de una eminente universidad del Oeste Medio que se vanagloria de haber enseñado a todos los que manejan la política mundial. Ha vivido de manera fastuosa, muy por encima de sus posibilidades. Su buen amigo Chick le ha sugerido que escriba un libro con sus opiniones sobre las ideas que sostienen al ser humano, o le matan, y ante la sorpresa de Ravelstein es un gran éxito que le convierte en millonario. Durante un viaje a París para celebrar las ventas del libro, ambos compartirán sus pensamientos sobre la muerte, la filosofía y la historia , los amores y los amigos, lo viejo y lo nuevo, así como la rutina de vodevil del pasado remoto. Reseña: «Bellow florece de nuevo... Ravelstein rebosa vida.» Time ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein''s own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies. Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow''s new novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

Much of The Adventures of Augie March takes place during the Great Depression, but far from being a chronicle of deprivation, the first of Saul Bellow’s string of masterpieces testifies to the explosive richness of life when it is lived at high risk and in tumultuous social circumstances. In a brawling Chicago of crooks, con artists, second-story men, extravagant dreamers, snappy dressers, and cold-eyed pragmatists, Augie March undergoes his sentimental education—an education that, though imbued with reality, will take him into realms progressively stranger, more marvelous, more filled with indecipherable meaning. The Adventures of Augie March is the product of an elegant and skeptical mind on which nothing is lost, and of an appetite for the look and feel of things that is both enormous and passionate. The result of these varying felicities is a novel that is immediate, strikingly unpredictable, authentic, and convincing.

She had lived by delays; she had meant to stop drinking; she had put off the time, and now she had smashed her car. At once harsh and tender, expansive and acutely funny, this is the story of an elderly and self-destructive dipsomaniac in a Western desert town, who finds herself faced with a final, impossible choice. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York''s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The spirited adventures of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home in deepest Africa.

For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie''s life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he''s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.