On March 25, at 8:00 p.m., the 18th Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party will take place at Acme Art Works (1714 N. Western Avenue). Algren (1909-1981), author of Chicago: City on the Make, is being honored by the Nelson Algren Committee, a group dedicated to promoting interest in Algren, who "made Chicago his trade." The event will feature readings, music, a photographic exhibition, a drawing for Algren books and memorabilia, and of course, birthday cake.
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."
We also publish H. E. F. Donohue’s Conversations with Nelson Algren, a collection of frank and often devastating conversations in which Algren reveals himself with all the gruff humor, deflating insight, honesty, and critical brilliance that marked his career. Algren discusses everything from his childhood to his compulsion to write to his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a masterful portrait of a rebel and a major American writer.