A masterful twist on the epistolary novel, Saul Bellow's Herzog is part confessional, part exorcism, and a wholly unique achievement in postmodern fiction. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury in Penguin Modern Classics.
Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age. In a crumbling house which he shares with rats, his head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart.
Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was a Canadian-born American writer who enjoyed a dazzling career as a novelist, marked with numerous literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His books include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, More Die of Heartbreak, Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize The Day and The Victim.
If you enjoyed Herzog, you might like Bellow's Seize the Day, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'Spectacular ... surely Bellow's greatest novel'
Malcolm Bradbury
'A masterpiece ... Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization'
The New York Times Book Review
