**A collection of Algren’s lost and unfinished writings, including his last novel and several stories considered to be among his masterpieces, with a new introduction by Algren's biographer Colin Asher."You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful." —Ernest Hemingway**Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful vo...

**A newly designed edition of one of the most worldly collections in Nelson Algren’s repertoire with a new introduction by Colin Asher."Algren at the top of his form."—New York Times**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, an...

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers."You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be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."Nonconformi...

With its depictions 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 found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed. “I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life,’” wrote Algren. “I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since...

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Brun Bicek, a would-be pub from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohu...

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, who has wr...

Frankie Machine, a veteran of the Second World War, returns to Chicago's Northwest side with a morphine habit. Nicknamed the 'kid with the golden arm', Frankie is an aspiring drummer by day and an illicit card-dealer by night. In Molly, an old flame, he sees the chance for redemption, for hard work and success - but the demons that chase Frankie are not quite ready to let go.Nelson Algren's critically acclaimed and enormously powerful novel probes the lives of the displaced and dis...

As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, “The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren’s career—the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedeviled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times.”Algren’s classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein...

Bruno Bicek, “Lefty,” is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn’t prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime boss, the Barber. Sinister and dark, the Barber controls Steffi and has no intention of letting her go. Why should he, when he holds all the cards...

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values inherent i...

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America’s greatest twentieth-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.”...

These recordings of twentieth-century American authors interpreting their own works were highly praised when first released in the 1960s. Today the cultural and historical value of these recordings makes them an essential part of our literary heritage.In this collection, James Baldwin reads from Giovanni's Room and Another Country, exploring the challenges of being black and gay in mid-twentieth century America. William Styron reads about a disabled child finding ...