A Silver Dish
- A Silver Dish
- Saul Bellow
- New Yorker Magazine, New York, Sept 25, 1978
This New Yorker magazine is the true first printing of A Silver Dish, Bellow’s dense and intellectual novella; his first published story after winning the 1976 Nobel Prize.
A luxurious signed limited edition of A Silver Dish was published one year later by Albondocani Press. I have showcased that gorgeous 1979 limited edition in a previous post. Check it out. It’s old-world craftsmanship is rarely seen in modern fiction; especially in this new era of ipads and inexpensive .pdf downloads.
In 1984, this novella came out again; this time in Bellow’s collection Him With His Foot in his Mouth.
It was a very well received story, but it is hard to find reviews for it today, because it has long been out of print except as part of the above-mentioned collection. However, I whole-heartedly agree with one reviewer from jiffynotes.com who said: “Bellow, the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, fills this long tale with acutely observed details and characters who are so unusual that they feel like they could only come from real life.
Woven throughout the story are meditations about religion, death, and responsibility that one expects in Bellow’s fiction. Long for a short story, A Silver Dish holds as much insight, humor, and wisdom as one may hope to find in a novel.”
Bellow, who died in 2005, was born in Canada, but lived his adult life in the States.
He has won countless major awards and now has the Pen/Saul Bellow award named after him. According to Wikipedia, ‘…this award goes to a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature’. The award began in 2007 and has had a very impressive three recipients so far: Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo.
