Bellow's Cheever

"Will I read your book? Will I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest, I shall get Harriet Wasserman of Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I am sure to read with the greatest pleasure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to John Cheever, November 10, 1976

Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

"Funny as hell"

In fact, dear reader, hell is no laughing matter, and we may need to protect the masses by censoring your words.

unbeaten paths

Similar to Mahrukh Aamir's "It is the Despair of One's Life, Being One's Character," Daniel Green's Issue Nine focuses in detail on Sheila Heti and her Alphabetical Diaries. In addition, Daniel Green's Issue Six has an extensive treatment of several of publisher Corona\Samizdat's experimental novels.

friends and repetitions

Ah, yes, our friends and their repetitions, and how friendly it is of them to listen to us repeat ourselves. 

the power of the truth

"The word 'hero,' long in disrepute, has been redeemed by [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn. He has had the courage, the power of mind and the strength of spirit to speak the truth to the entire world. He is a man of perfect intellectual honor and, in his moral strength, he is peculiarly Russian. To the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state."

~~ Saul Bellow to The New York Times, January 7, 1974