Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop Small Sale
Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Donโt miss outโpurchases support local bookstores.
Shop the saleLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Nowโs a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todaySeize the Day
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weโre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreFading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as "the type that loses the girl"); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding and offers him one last hope.
Saul Bellow (1915โ2005), author of numerous novels, novellas, and stories, was the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards. He also received the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. He taught at New York University, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota and was chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981.ย He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine.ย Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist.ย In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year."
ย
Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams.ย Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules.ย Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University.ย He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
Reviews
“It is the special distinction of Mr. Bellow as a novelist that he is able to give us, step by step, the world we really live each day—and in the same movement to show us that the real suffering of not understanding, the deprivation of light. It is this double gift that explains the unusual contribution he is making to our fiction.”
“One of the finest short novels in the language.”
“Saul Bellow is one of the giants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why.”
“Grover Gardner’s everyman narrative voice augments the fumbling, oafish life of Wilhelm by supplying the character with an air of bafflement, even helplessness. The pliable narration gives color to the supporting characters of Wilhelm’s father and especially to Doctor Tamkin, whose blunt philosophizing about living in modern times provides the core of this short novel. Gardner’s approach eschews the expected New York City accent for Wilhelm in favor of emphasizing his off-kilter inner turmoil, reminding the listener that Seize the Day is a dark comedy, not just grim reality.”
Expand reviews