This is a byte of self promotion. A byte? Haw. From the jacket blurb:
Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, “if his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall”? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren’s golden arm with which to write this riveting, gonzo mini-biography of the man Hemingway called “the best novelist in America after William Faulkner.” Algren was being translated by Jean-Paul Sartre while he was sleeping with Sartre’s wife and he preferred to spend time in boxing gyms than to hang round literary cocktail parties. He had enough chutzpah to place a whole city, Chicago, in the opposing corner of the ring and to give it a bloody nose and a sore head for treating him as an outsider – an outsider who wrote twenty-four hours a day and who faced exile for, as his friend Kurt Vonnegut noted, “writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were.” — Heathcote Williams
Pete Anderson says
This sounds fantastic. Where can I get it in the U.S.?
Jan Herman says
It’s being printed now. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll let you know.
warren leming says
let me know please by email…. so that we can purchase a copy for the algren archive here thanks, warren leming
vice chairman
nelson algren committee
http://www.nelsonalgren.org