Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1154994 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 435 pages

From Library Journal
This 1973 volume was reprinted along with Algren's 1986 The Neon Wilderness. Together they offer both short stories and nonfiction pieces dealing with the baser elements of life presented by someone who knew them well. (Classic Returns, LJ 10/15/97)
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
The Last Carousel is a tour-de-force anthology of Nelson Algren's short stories. Here is Algren's rich output from the 1960s and 1970s. Tough, streetwise stories and travelogues from around the world, The Last Carousel includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of his beloved Chicago White Sox, and more! -- Midwest Book Review

About the Author
Nelson Algren (19091981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award, A Walk on the Wild Side, and Never Come Morning.

Customer Reviews

Some Real Gems in a Very Mixed Bag
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 Walk On The Wild Side- Hold On
Parts of this review were used in a review of Algren's classic Man With The Golden Arm and of the collection of short stories in The Neon Wilderness. These short stories in the Last Carousel reflect the same milieu that Algren worked in that novel although he has taken some of the stories out of Chicago and some of them are from a later period in the 1960's and 1970's. In a strange sense Algren throughout his literary career was working that same small vein- but what a mother lode he produced.

Growing up in a post World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun and the ne'er do well hustler. And also the mechanisms one needed to develop to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it.

Nelson Algren has gotten, through hanging around Chicago police stations and the sheer ability to observe, that sense of foreboding, despair and of the abyss of America's mean streets down pat in a number of works, including this collection of his better stories. Along the way we meet an array of stoolies, cranks, crackpots and nasty brutish people who are more than willing to put obstacles in the way of anyone who gets in their way. But to what end? They lose in the end, and drag others down with them.

We, of late, have become rather inured to lumpen stories either of the death and destruction type or of the rehabilitative kind but at the time that these stories were put together in the late 1940's and early 1950's this was something of an eye-opener for those who were not familiar with the seamy side of urban life. The dead end jobs, the constant run-ins with the `authorities' in the person of the police, many times corrupt as well. The dread of going to work, the dread of not going to work, the fear of being victimized and the glee of victimizing. The whole jumbled mix of people with few prospects and fewer dreams.

Algren has put it down in writing for all that care to read. These are not pretty stories. And he has centered his stories on the trials and tribulations of gimps, prostitutes and other hustlers. Damn, as much as I knew about the kind of things that Algren was describing these are still gripping stories. And, if the truth were told, you know as well as I do that unfortunately these stories could still be written today. Read Algren if you want to walk on the wild side.