The Bear Comes Home is a novel written by Rafi Zabor

Rafi Zabor

Rafi Zabor is a Brooklyn, New York music journalist- and musician-turned-novelist. He received the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his first novel, The Bear Comes Home, which follows an alto saxophonist - who happens to be a bear - in his pursuit of musical perfection...

. It won the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. It was selected as an alternate for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award

Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award

The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award is awarded annually to a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction. The award is named after Ernest Hemingway and funded by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, which has been administered by the Hemingway...

.

The novel tells the story of an alto saxophone

Alto saxophone

The alto saxophone is a member of the saxophone family of woodwind instruments invented by Belgian instrument designer Adolphe Sax in 1841. It is smaller than the tenor but larger than the soprano, and is the type most used in classical compositions...

-playing bear

Bear

Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern...

, his involvement in the jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 subculture, and his pursuit of love, truth and perfection. Musician

Musician (magazine)

Musician was a monthly magazine that covered news and information about American popular music. Initially called "Music America", it was founded in 1976 by Sam Holdsworth and Gordon Baird. The two friends borrowed $20,000 from relatives and started the publication in a barn in Colorado...

published the first chapters of The Bear Comes Home, in serialized

Serial (literature)

In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...

 form, beginning in 1979. Zabor resumed work on the remainder of the book after a fourteen-year hiatus, and W. W. Norton published the novel in 1997.

External links

• The Bear Comes Home webpage at W. W. Norton & Company