The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren

The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Texas
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This slender volume preserves a unique and devastating view of the Lone Star State during the Depression, a world of hoboes, migrant workers, ranch hands, penniless Mexicans, carnival roustabouts, and the dangerous and helpless inhabitants of county jails.

The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren

The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Texas
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This slender volume preserves a unique and devastating view of the Lone Star State during the Depression, a world of hoboes, migrant workers, ranch hands, penniless Mexicans, carnival roustabouts, and the dangerous and helpless inhabitants of county jails.

A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374525323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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".

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren PDF Author: Colin Asher
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244520
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
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.”

Female Trouble

Female Trouble PDF Author: Antonya Nelson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743242343
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"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.

Chicago, City on the Make

Chicago, City on the Make PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226013848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
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

Republic of Detours

Republic of Detours PDF Author: Scott Borchert
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374719055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | Winner of the New Deal Book Award An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns—while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day’s most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing—forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP’s chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll. By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation’s very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book’s lessons are urgent and strong.

Demons in the Spring

Demons in the Spring PDF Author: Joe Meno
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1936070871
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
From the author of Between Everything and Nothing, “an inspired collection of twenty stories, brilliant in its command of tone and narrative perspective” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Demons in the Spring is a collection of twenty short stories by Joe Meno, author of the smash hits The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned, with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds—Todd Baxter, Kelsey Brookes, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Nick Butcher, Steph Davidson, Evan Hecox, Kim Hiorthoy, Paul Hornschemeier, Cody Hudson, Caroline Hwang, kozyndan, Geoff McFetridge, Anders Nilsen, Laura Owens, Archer Prewitt, Jon Resh, Jay Ryan, Souther Salazar, Rachell Sumpter, and Chris Uphues. In these stories, oddly modern moments occur in the most familiar of public places—from offices to airports to schools to zoos to emergency rooms. A young girl refuses to go anywhere unless she’s dressed as a ghost. A bank robbery in Stockholm goes terribly wrong. A teacher becomes enamored with the students in his school’s Model United Nations club. A couple is affected by a strange malady. A miniature city begins to develop in a young woman’s chest. These inventive stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and unusual. A portion of the author’s proceeds from the book will go directly to benefit 826 CHICAGO, a nonprofit tutoring center, part of the national organization of tutoring centers with branches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle. Finalist for the 2008 Story Prize Time Out Chicago Best Books of 2008 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2008 “This short story collection succeeds word to word, sentence to sentence, and cover to cover.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Understanding Nelson Algren

Understanding Nelson Algren PDF Author: Brooke Horvath
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035746
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Brooke Horvath surveys the literary contributions of a writer known as the voice of America’s dispossessed. Horvath offers an introduction to the life and work of the Chicagoan who wrote about the underclass in the Windy City and beyond, bringing to the fore their humanity and aspirations. Examining Algren’s eleven major works, Horvath sets Algren’s evolution as a writer against the backdrop of the nation’s shifting social, political, and economic landscape.

Grass Roof, Tin Roof

Grass Roof, Tin Roof PDF Author: Dao Strom
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547972830
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A Vietnamese family flees its war-torn home and resettles in California, in a novel that offers a “brilliant exploration of exile, loss, and identity” (Robert Olen Butler). Told from multiple perspectives and spanning several decades, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here, she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance—but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family, as the children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms. In delicate, innovative prose, Strom’s characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is “an affecting study on the slippery nature of home” (Los Angeles Times). “[Strom] explores the mysteries of loss, culture and identity, with skill, poignancy and imagination.” —Detroit Free Press

A River Runs through It and Other Stories

A River Runs through It and Other Stories PDF Author: Norman MacLean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647223X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation