A fascinating transcript of conversations, circa 1962-64, with my literary hero. Algren discusses his life, his books, the literary establishment and the world at large with his usual combination of humor, swagger and keen insight.

There are some excellent stories (tales of growing up on Chicago's south side in the 19-teens), some very good stories (about bookies, railbirds, and down-on-their luck jockeys), and some mediocre stories (essays from a trip to Viet Nam and stories of pimps and prostitues in Saigon) in this collection. The best pieces made the collection well worth it for me.

Algren is one of the most lyrical writers that I've read. Few have written prose that gives me the sense of rhythm and melody in the English language that I get from Algren's best stuff (Toni Morrison comes to mind). My favorite passage in this book, from EVERYTHING INSIDE'S A PENNY -- "My father was a fixer of tools, a fixer of machinery; a fixer of tables gone wobbly and windows that had stuck....Other men wished secretly to be forever drunken. He wished to be forever fixing."

A very beautiful book which reveals another Simon de beauvoir: the one in love. She's passionate, sincere, writing with her heart to his "beloved" transatlantic love. They met in America when Simon came to give a cycle of conferences around the States, and they started to write from this moment. We see how their love rises, how they open their hearts letter by letter, and we realize that her love was nothing but authentic. It's also a very interesting reading about life in Paris among the intellectuals of the time, the day by day with Sartre and their travelling together around the world. You really get in touch with this time and this circle of people. Very touching.

The majority of the short stories in this book are early attempts of parts of his first novel: Somebody in boots. These stories show the promise of the writer to come, but, unless you are a ardent fan, there are better collections of his short stories than this on the market.

"The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren." Edited and with an introduction by Bettina Drew. University of Texas Press, 1995

In "Texas Stories", Nelson Algren - the"bard of the stumblebum" best known for his 1949 novel "The Man With The Golden Arm" - peoples his hardscrabble vignettes with the flotsam and jetsam of Depression-era America ; characters who obsessively drift across the desolate and windswept Texas landscape like so many sagebrushes tumbling down the gullies of a prairie ghost town.

But even though the tramps, loners, carnival hustlers, whores, illiterate Okies and Mexican convicts on the run gathered in these 14 short stories and sketches written at different stages of Algren's long career belong to an era long since passed, "Texas Stories" rings with a surprisingly contemporary resonance.

This is because Algren, who died in 1981, blends a sharply honed psychology with his trenchant social protest, avoiding cheap sentimentality by focusing as equally on the tragic-comic and grotesque aspects of his character's motives as he does on the underlying economic and social wrongs that have sent them spinning to their fate.

At his best, in short stories like "Kewpie Doll", the balance works superbly. Here a mundane, almost descriptive account of a boisterous crowd of poverty-stricken rural towns people pilfering a train for winter coal yields sharply to a horrifying conclusion - the decapitation of a child on the tracks as the train takes off, all the more tragic for its seeming randomness.

Curtis Price

Baltimore, USA

cansv@igc.apc.org

This is a helpful set of books if you need to know what the books are about or some insight on the story line. Don't expect too much deep literary criticism.