Nearly 20 years after the great Jewish and American novelist’s death, we have never been more in need of his thirst for life
Sometimes art isn’t nice
How to write? With love, says the author.
A Syrian-born poet resembles Arab literary men of the ancient past
A reader’s notes from the Old City
How Sefton Goldberg saved my life
Bette Howland steps out of the shadow of Saul Bellow
Bookworm: The master of fiction shares some rules for writing, then neglects to follow them himself
On the late writer’s evolution from secular psychological realist to seeker of the nation’s holy heart
The case of Judith Clark
Hannah gets some unexpected news, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow get name dropped, and Ray confronts his own mortality
The Nobel prize-winning author called the Jerusalem mayor a ‘phenomenal personality, schemer, finagler, and arranger’ who ‘towers over most of the political figures I have known.’
Jewish theology and Dante’s poetry, past lives and imagined ones, collide in a the new comic novel ‘Good on Paper’
In defense, and praise, of the champion of personality, for whom Jewishness was simply a fact of life, not an ‘identity’
A new collection of the writer’s aggrieved nonfiction sends readers running back to his masterful fiction
‘The Age of the Crisis of Man’ traces the fall and rise of individualist pragmatism in America
‘This is a report on a library trip to Israel from a bookish girl who is now a bookish old lady’
The turbulent private—and public—affairs of a titanic figure in American Jewish intellectual life
