Bellow's Rosenfeld

"I liked your [Isaac] Rosenfeld lecture very much. I agreed with most of it. Perhaps I would not write to you about Isaac even if I were not running because I am still thinking about his life, his character, his thoughts and his death and am not yet ready to discuss him. But I will say this: He combined all the reticence and shyness of a small sickly Jewish boy from Chicago with heroic ideas about destiny. And after all, history would not have been history without these apparently timid and inconspicuous Jewish children."

~~ Saul Bellow to Mark Schechner, September 30, 1975

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.