Charlie Citrine, suffering from steadily worsening troubles with women, career, and life in general, receives unexpected aid and comfort in the form of a belated bequest from his onetime friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher.

"In this unique noir masterpiece by the incomparable Saul Bellow, a young man is sucked into the mysterious, heat-filled vortex of New York City. Asa Leventhal, a temporary bachelor with his wife away on a visit to her mother, attempts to find relief from a Gotham heat wave, only to be accosted in the park by a down-at-the-heels stranger who accuses Leventhal of ruining his life. Unable to shake the stranger loose, Leventhal is led by his own self-doubts...

Clara Velde is a successful fashion writer in New York City and the star of the story. The book's title refers to the disappearance of Clara's prized emerald ring. Clara associates the ring with her love for the Washington, D.C. politico Ithiel and with her own professional and personal power. The ring's apparent theft leads Clara into a series of psychological crises and forces her to confront a long-buried complex of interpersonal issues.

Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from "bliss to breakdown." Imagining that a settled existence...

During World War II, expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Bellow's first novel documents Joseph's psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

This novel recounts the unconventional exploits of a man who preferred to change jobs constantly in an age of specialization.

"Sammler, a New Yorker in his seventies, a refugee from Nazism, a thinker of complex thoughts, a touchstone around whom a heterogeneous group revolves, is not simply the protagonist but the prime mover of a many-sided novel held together by the centripetal force of his presence. The counterpoint of personalities, subplots, and incidents constitutes a tragi-comic commentary on twentieth-century urban life but it is Sammler's considered reflections...

"Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously - and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's surprise he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in...

Collection of forty-seven stories selected by the Nobel Prize winning author from among the writings he authored from 1953-1981.