Download or read book Conversations with Nelson Algren written by H. E. F. Donohue and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-06-11 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these frank and often devastating conversations Nelson Algren reveals himself with all the gruff humor, deflating insight, honesty, and critical brilliance that marked his career. Prodded by H. E. F. Donohue, Algren discusses everything from his childhood to his compulsion to write to his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a masterful portrait of a rebel and a major American writer.
Download or read book Chicago City on the Make written by Nelson Algren and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents Algren's irreverent portrait of Chicago--the hustlers' town--which records the character and lifestyles of the Windy City from pioneer days through Prohibition and the reign of Richard Daley
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 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 Man with the Golden Arm written by Nelson Algren and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel about a young drug addict and his daily encounters as he pursues his eternal quest for means to support his habit.
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 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 Entrapment and Other Writings written by Nelson Algren and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places. In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. "You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch," Ernest Hemingway declared. "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."
Download or read book Famous Men Who Never Lived written by K. Chess and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for a 2019 Sidewise Award “Conceptually adventurous yet full of feeling. . . . smart, thought-provoking, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States—an alternate timeline, somewhere across the multiverse—she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner, Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram’s copy of The Pyronauts—a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback—and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel’s efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost. With Famous Men Who Never Lived, K Chess has created a compelling and inventive speculative work on what home means to those who have lost it forever.
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 Nelson Algren written by Robert Ward and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of eleven essays on Algren's major work offers a diverse and lively range of theoretical and historical readings. These include discussions of Algren's place in Chicago's left-wing literary tradition, the aesthetic of American and European naturalism, and his reaction to, and reception in, the Cold War milieu of the 1940s and 1950s. Consideration is also given to the ways in which paperback cover designs shaped the reception of Algren's novels as pulp fiction. Algren's works are further illuminated by the theories of Walter Benjamin, and those associated with confinement, autobiography, post-colonialism, and the cultural politics of American carnival. The volume is supplemented by a piece that traces the birth and growth of the Algren archive at Ohio State University. Robert Ward lectures in American Literature at St. Martin's College, Lancaster.
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 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 Nelson Algren written by Bettina Drew and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Third Coast written by Thomas L. Dyja and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.
Download or read book The Coast of Chicago written by Stuart Dybek and published by Picador. This book was released on 2004-04-03 with total page 197 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 A Transatlantic Love Affair written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by . This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of three hundred letters chronicles the twenty-year relationship between the two authors
