Penguin Modern Classics: Him With His Foot in His Mouth: & Other Stories

In their adroit handling of the theme of self-recognition the short pieces collected here constitute a significant contribution to American short fiction. In "Him with His Foot in His Mouth", a musicologist awaiting extradition in British Columbia unfolds the "strange formulations" of his past that led to a criminal offense. "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is a richly textured novella depicting the passions and comic conflicts of a single day in the lives of a divorced suburban matron and her lovers. Displaying his exceptional skill of reanimating a bygone Chicago, Bellow offers a deft portrat of the artist as a precocious and eccentric young man in "Zetland: By a Character Witness", and a memorable tale of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son in "A Silver Dish." In "Cousins" the successful Ijah Brodsky confronts a foreign and unfamiliar self when family feeling draws him into encounters with the criminal and the naively idealistic. A dazzling collection from a major storyteller.