Entrapment - by Nelson Algren (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 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 sex workers 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. Algren admired them all for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living, their self-awareness, and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

Entrapment and Other Writings contains his unfinished last novel, previously unpublished or uncollected stories and poems, and reportage. Algren speaks to our time as few of his American contemporaries of the 1940s and '50s do, in part because he was always the outsider.

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.

An Algren specialist as well as an established poet, BROOKE HORVATH is Emeritus Professor of English at Kent State University and an editor of volumes about Henry James and Thomas Pynchon. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including At Times, In a Neighborhood of Dying Light, Consolation at Ground Zero, and The Lecture on Dust, as well as a book of criticism, Understanding Nelson Algren. He lives with his wife Virginia and their daughters in Kent, Ohio.

DAN SIMON is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. His contributions to Algren scholarship include the essay "Algren's Question" in the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, which he coedited, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a lost manuscript that Simon found in the Algren archives, coedited with C.S. O'brien, and to which he contributed the afterword.

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.