PHILIP ROTH never really left New Jersey. Saul Bellow could not keep his characters out of Chicago. And Haruki Murakami’s ...

For instance, in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, the narrator describes the novel’s title character, a fearsome, ...

Saul Bellow. When they step out of the margins it’s often because something has gone wrong. In 2017 the highly esteemed biographer Megan Marshall, who won big prizes for her books about long ...

When the story was left out of the 1963 anthology “Great Jewish Short Stories,” he complained to the volume’s editor, his friend and future Nobelist Saul Bellow. “I said, Saul, you told me ...

Saul Bellow could not keep his characters out of Chicago. And Haruki Murakami’s narrators—unmarried, often middle-aged men with solitary habits—continually slip into eerie netherworlds.