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Title: The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren
Author: Nelson Algren
Narrator: Henry Strozier
Format: Unabridged
Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-12-08
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
O. Henry and National Book Award-winning author Nelson Algren has inspired thousands with his tough, gritty accounts of urban life. Written over the course of four decades, this collection of 12 stories centers around Depression-era Texas. Characterized by small-town strife, political corruption and frontier-style justice, each tale is a testament to the struggles of the working poor. Also among the stories is a retelling of the myth of Bonnie and Clyde.
©1995 University of Texas Press; (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC
Members Reviews:
Texas Stories From the Bard of the Chicago Slums
I had never read any stories by Nelson Algren but became curious about him after learning of a writing competition named for him. Even though he is associated with Chicago some of his greatest work came out of time he spent in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the early 1930s. These were the years of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, times which challenged the poor, down & out people Algren often focused on. These tales show how well Algren could portray characters in extreme circumstances without ever becoming caricatures. His Bonnie and Clyde in the story "After the Buffalo" shows an ability to make the story of the famed bank robbers seem new and compelling. This will not be the last Algren that I read.
30's era "Texas Stories" rings with a contemporary resonance
"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
[email protected]
Better examples of his short stoties elswhere
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.
