32mo. (8)ff. Seidenberg's painted and etched illustrations capture the Nobel Laureate's wintry and lyrical prose. The protagonist of Bellow's novel, published in 1982, follows his wife, an astrophysicist, to her homeland in the Eastern Bloc, where he observes with despair the conditions of a totalitarian state. In the passage excerpted here, it is clear that the natural landscape is no exception to the desperate, stark feeling. Within it, though, as in the novel, there is a sense of something outside the immediate experiences of the downtrodden citizen, here conveyed by the book's box, which features at its lid a clear plastic observatory dome. Book bound in sky-blue wrappers, and sits comfortably in the wooden box with nail-heads forming constellations on the lid.