Saul Bellow’s masterpieces: Still AWOL from E—including the Kindle Store?
The old Chicago neighborhood of Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize winner, is the subject of an evocative essay in the travel section of today’s New York Times.
But guess what? As far as I could determine just now, Bellow’s masterpieces are still not available as e-books. It’s something to think about next time you read a gleeful essay about people reading only off their e-gizmos, not off paper.
Writers are not commodities, and it would be a shame if format prejudices kept readers away from Bellow’s works such as Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift.
Meanwhile Amazon and others should get hopping and see if Bellow’s agents or publishers will allow e-book editions.
Photo: Bellow with Keith Botsford in the early 1990s (info on Botsford here).
Related: I remember Saul Bellow—Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’s TeleRead essay.
Also of interest: Studs Terkel dies: No e-books of his works.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift are literary masterpieces that deserve the widest audience possible. My Master’s thesis was a study of Bellow’s concept and use of the soul and consciousness in Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and Humboldt’s Gift, three books that are as hilarious as the are enlightening. Because I do most of my reading now using ebooks, I check back often for digital editions of these novels, but to no avail. I imagine I’ll have to manually scan them using OCR software, a daunting task, but inescapable since there are no digital versions of these books currently on the market. A bloody shame, to say the leas,t considering all the meaningless mass-market ordure that is out there.