There is nothing about Toni Morrison that isn’t distinctive. The way she thinks, the rhythm of her speech, her appearance, even her laughter. It’s robust and full and she embraces it with unselfconscious abandon. Her voice, in life and in her work, is epi

Here," says John Irving, removing fading pictures from a folder, "are the first photographs of my father that I ever saw." Though four years have passed since that initial glimpse, Irving, 63, is still visibly moved as he holds a 1943 photo of his father,

Letters. Sometimes, released from dusty shoeboxes and tall filing cabinets, they can explode in your face, like bombs. For Janis Bellow, however, the long-awaited publication of the letters of her husband, Saul, is "overwhelmingly joyful".

Saul Bellow wrote the novel in Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago. Bellow had married Susan Glassman, his third wife, in 1961, and this marriage took only three years to collapse.