The Last Carousel - by Nelson Algren (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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, the last of Nelson Algren's works published during his lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world--from boxing matches and brothels to gambling tables and horse races to reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diverse range of interests are revealed and celebrated through his gritty and unabridged accounts of the vagabond lifestyle.

Review Quotes

"What an exhilarating experience it is to read Nelson Algren's new collection of stories!" -Chicago Sun-Times

"It's about time! When we've got a living American writer as surefooted and as fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it's almost criminal not to have something of his hard in covers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in . . . What we have here in this big fat volume is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces . . . with his hallmark stamped on every link." -New York Times Book Review

"Essential Algren." -Washington Post

"Very good, fast, funny and tough . . . Algren, where have you been hiding." -San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

One of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981) believed that "literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity." Recipient of the first National Book Award for Fiction and lauded by Hemingway as "one of the two best authors in America," Algren remains among the most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, including Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning (1945), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), two short fiction collections, The Neon Wilderness (1947) and The Last Carousel (1973), a book-length prose-poem, Chicago: City on the Make (1951), and several collections of reportage. Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

COLIN ASHER is the author of Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren (W.W. Norton, 2019), a literary biography written as a work of creative nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and many other publications.