Download or read book The Short Writings of Nelson Algren written by Richard F. Bales and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nelson Algren was a renowned Chicago writer known for his social commentary and his novels like The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Although he continues to be remembered almost exclusively for his novels, this book aims to highlight the value and influence of his short form works. Before he died in 1981, Algren had amassed a genre-defying body of work, including short stories, articles, poems and book reviews. The present book features a comprehensive analysis and discussion of Algren's lost literature, including everything but his novels. One of the pieces covered is a masterpiece of race relations written in 1950, more than 60 years before the galvanization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Another is a scathing poem about Algren's transatlantic love affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Both items are reprinted in the book courtesy of the Algren estate. This book also includes references to Algren's works that have yet to be studied by Algren scholars.
Download or read book A Walk on the Wild Side written by Nelson Algren and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-06-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its depiction of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, "A Walk on the Wild Side" tells, in Algren's own words, "something about the natural toughness of women and men, in that order".
Download or read book Chicago City on the Make written by Nelson Algren and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1983 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago." "Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat--faced hustlers and money--loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination. . . . [This book] searches a city's heart and mind rather than its avenues and public buildings."--New York Times Book Review "This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."--New York Herald Tribune Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.
Download or read book Never a Lovely So Real The Life and Work of Nelson Algren written by Colin Asher and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive biography reclaims Nelson Algren as a towering literary figure and finally unravels the enigma of his disappearance from American letters. For a time, Nelson Algren was America’s most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren’s third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren’s talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer’s block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic. Now, almost forty years after Algren’s death, Colin Asher finally captures the full, novelistic story of his life in a magisterial biography set against mid-twentieth-century American politics and culture. Drawing from interviews, archival correspondence, and the most complete version of Algren’s 886-page FBI file ever released, Colin Asher portrays Algren as a dramatic iconoclast. A member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, Algren used his writing to humanize Chicago’s underclass, while excoriating the conservative radicalism of the McCarthy era. Asher traces Algren’s development as a thinker, his close friendship and falling out with Richard Wright, and his famous affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Most intriguingly, Asher uncovers the true cause of Algren’s artistic exile: a reckless creative decision that led to increased FBI scrutiny and may have caused a mental breakdown. In his second act, Algren was a vexing figure who hid behind a cynical facade. He called himself a “journalist” and a “loser,” though many still considered him one of the greatest living American authors. An inspiration to writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Martha Gellhorn, Jimmy Breslin, Betty Friedan, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Thomas Pynchon, Algren nevertheless struggled to achieve recognition, and died just as his career was on the verge of experiencing a renaissance. Never a Lovely So Real offers an exquisitely detailed, engrossing portrait of a master who, as esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar wrote, was capable of suggesting “the whole contour of a human life in a few terse pages.”
Download or read book The Last Carousel written by Nelson Algren and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 1997-04-08 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.
Download or read book The Devil s Stocking written by Nelson Algren and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil’s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren’s last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.
Download or read book Nonconformity written by Nelson Algren and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. "You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards . . . [where there] are still . . . defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.
Download or read book Chicago written by Nelson Algren and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its "nobodies nobody knows" the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of American Short Stories written by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.
Download or read book The Last Carousel written by Nelson Algren and published by Penguin Adult HC/TR. This book was released on 1973 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories from a classic Chicago writer, featuring a colorful gallery of bums, beats, jocks, clowns, and smart alecks.
Download or read book Ordination written by Scott A. Kaukonen and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a debut collection of short fiction, eight stories that explore the gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we have lived. In "Punitive Damages," a father, the beneficiary of a huge financial settlement in compensation for his son's death, must confront the truth of the life that the son's death has provided. In "Punnett's Squares," winner of the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an adopted son seeks to prove, against all evidence to the contrary, that his adoptive father is in fact his biological father. In "Induction Ceremony," a small-town basketball hero returns to his hometown no longer a man but now a woman, and his onetime teammate-and-friend must reconsider who they were and who they are now. In the pair of pieces that bookend the collection, "Ordination" and "Be a Missionary," a Baptist preacher's son must reconcile the distance between the evidence of things seen and the evidence of things unseen." "These are men and boys who like to see themselves as worthy of the titles of father, son, husband, lover, and friend, but who must fight their own instincts and desires to claim such honors. These are boys and men for whom questions of identity - biological, cultural, sexual, religious, moral - are unavoidable, men and boys always seeking to be who they want to be, always aware of who they are."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Chicago s Nelson Algren written by Art Shay and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn’t pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay’s camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren’s poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools. Chicago’s Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you’ll see Shay’s pictures; look at Shay’s photos and you’ll hear Nelson’s words.
Download or read book The Coast of Chicago written by Stuart Dybek and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2004-04-03 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.
Download or read book Sacred Smokes written by Theodore C. Van Alst and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians.
Download or read book Algren written by Mary Wisniewski and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Algren: A Life is a new biography of Chicago writer Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, Never Come Morning, multiple short stories, and travel essays" --
Download or read book Female Trouble written by Antonya Nelson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-04-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nelson's prose is precise and energetic, and her insights delight because they manage to be at once surprising and so right as to seem inevitable." -- The New York Times Book Review Antonya Nelson is widely regarded as one of America's most talented women writers -- The New Yorker has named her one of the twenty best writers of her generation -- and with Female Trouble she returns to the short-story form with which she made her original literary mark. Thirteen wise, funny, and startlingly perceptive stories about the vagaries of marriage, the uncertainties of family, and the revelations of female life, Female Trouble looks at the relationships not just between men and women but also between parents and children, brothers and sisters. Probing the subjects of love, fidelity, desire, dependence, and solitude, Nelson explores the broad notion of family from myriad angles, but always with surprising insight and her trademark offbeat humor. The title story features a thirty-year-old man carrying on intimate relationships with three different women -- one institutionalized, one pregnant, one purely maternal -- but unable to commit to any of them. "Incognito" depicts a divorced woman whose turbulent teen years are suddenly brought back to her when she returns to her hometown with her own teenage daughter. In "The Unified Front," a husband reckons with his wife's decision to steal a baby while at a famous theme park, and in "Stitches," a disturbing late-night phone call forces a mother to confront her college-age daughter's sexuality and her own adulterous past. Set in the vividly rendered Southwest and Midwest, these moving stories are dark and honest portraits of people in moral quandaries, gray areas, unclear circumstances -- stories that reveal us to ourselves with disturbing clarity. As always, Nelson astounds with the clean, terse power of her language, and she deftly uses humor to expose the soft underbellies of her tough-talking, unblinking characters. These are stories that will linger in the reader's mind long after they are read.
Download or read book Hack written by Dmitry Samarov and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cabdrivers and their yellow taxis are as much a part of the cityscape as the high-rise buildings and the subway. We hail them without thought after a wearying day at the office or an exuberant night on the town. And, undoubtedly, taxi drivers have stories to tell—of farcical local politics, of colorful passengers, of changing neighborhoods and clandestine shortcuts. No one knows a city’s streets—and thus its heart—better than its cabdrivers. And from behind the wheel of his taxi, Dmitry Samarov has seen more of Chicago than most Chicagoans will hope to experience in a lifetime. An artist and painter trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Samarov began driving a cab in 1993 to make ends meet, and he’s been working as a taxi driver ever since. In Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, he recounts tales that will delight, surprise, and sometimes shock the most seasoned urbanite. We follow Samarov through the rhythms of a typical week, as he waits hours at the garage to pick up a shift, ferries comically drunken passengers between bars, delivers prostitutes to their johns, and inadvertently observes drug deals. There are long waits with other cabbies at O’Hare, vivid portraits of street corners and their regular denizens, amorous Cubs fans celebrating after a game at Wrigley Field, and customers who are pleasantly surprised that Samarov is white—and tell him so. Throughout, Samarov’s own drawings—of his fares, of the taxi garage, and of a variety of Chicago street scenes—accompany his stories. In the grand tradition of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Mike Royko, and Studs Terkel, Dmitry Samarov has rendered an entertaining, poignant, and unforgettable vision of Chicago and its people.
