Nelson Algren

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 dispossessed of post-war America.

Dove Findhorn is a naive country boy who busts out of Hicksville, Texas in pursuit of a better life in New Orleans. Amongst the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers and hustlers of the old French Quarter, Dove finds only hopelessness, crime and despair. His quest uncovers a harrowing grotesque of the American Dream. A Walk in the Wild Side is an angry, lonely, large-hearted and often funny masterpiece that has captured the imaginations of every generation since its first publication in 1956, and that rendered a world later immortalised in Lou Reed''s classic song.

In the Mithila region of North Bihar there is an old tradition of painting the walls of the nuptial chamber. The paintings are an assemblage of symbolic images of the lotus plant, the bamboo grove, fishes, birds and snakes in union, and represent fertility and the proliferation of life.

Nelson Algrens 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 Malayasia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values inherent in Hemingways stories as he visits the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay, and Calcutta.Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete and Chicago, as Algren adventures with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, and Juliette Greco.

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 theyd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algrens 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 Writingscontaining his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essaysAlgren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and 50s do, in part because he hasnt 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 cant 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."

Un meublé dans la pénombre rassemble, pour la première fois et par ordre chronologique (de 1934 à 1981), des nouvelles, des récits, des poèmes et des articles de Nelson Algren devenu une sorte de con

Texte intégral révisé suivi dune biographie de Nelson Algren. Loeuvre de Nelson Algren — Le Désert de néon, LHomme au bras dor, Chicago: City On The Make, A Walk on the Wild Side — se situe dans la t

La novela detalla los problemas y dificultades de un crupier ilícito Frankie Machine, y de los personajes variopintos que le rodean en el Chicago de finales de los años cuarenta. Como veterano de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Frankie se esfuerza por estabilizar su vida personal, tratando de ganarse la vida y luchando contra una creciente adiccion a la morfina. Mafiosos, camellos, drogadictos, prostitutas, este es el ambiente que rodea a Frankie, en el barrio polaco de Chicago, por lo que va a costarle gran trabajo escapar del mundo en que ha crecido.

En un pueblo de mala muerte de Texas, en el Profundo Sur y en plena Gran Depresión, Dove Linkhorn crece inocente y desamparado sin siquiera asistir a la escuela porque su padre, que se gana la vida limpiando pozos negros y lanzando desquiciadas predicas antipapistas a sus paisanos, la considera una perdida de tiempo y una influencia corruptora. Educado entre los vagabundos que se desplazan como polizones en los trenes de mercancias a la busqueda de trabajo, Dove acabara convertido tambien en vagabundo para salir adelante. Buen chico, con sentido del humor, enamoradizo y lo suficientemente picaro para sobrevivir, persigue su sueño en un mundo poblado de blancos y negros analfabetos, timadores, borrachos, macarras y prostitutas. En ese ambiente violento, desolado y sordido, donde pese a todo perviven casi en secreto el amor y la lealtad, Dove perdera algo mas que la inocencia. A partir de personajes inolvidables como Dove, su amiga Kitty Twist una adolescente tan curtida que ya esta de vuelta de todo u otras mujeres como Hallie una prostituta que le enseña a leer, este libro se pregunta, en palabras del propio Algren, por que a menudo los perdedores se convierten en mejores seres humanos que aquellos que nunca han estado perdidos en su vida. Por que los hombres que han sufrido en manos de otros hombres son los que creen en la humanidad; mientras que aquellos cuya tarea ha sido simplemente adquirir y tomarlo todo sin dar nada son los que mas la desprecian. Considerada como una de las grandes novelas americanas, Un paseo por el lado salvaje sigue interpelando a los lectores de hoy, pues como escribio Russell Banks, Algren dijo la verdad al poder alli donde se topo con el [] Y escribio de forma brillante, especialmente en este libro, para mi su mejor obra.

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algrens defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The authors only romance, the novel concerns Brun Bicek, a would-be pub from Chicagos 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. Donohue.

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algrens defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of Americas greatest 20th-century writers."You dont 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 writers 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 McCarthys heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.