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