MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE - Softcover

Nelson Algren

3.87

3,042 ratings by Goodreads

9781888363180: MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888363185 ISBN 13: 9781888363180

Publisher: SEVEN STORIES PRESS, 1997

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A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.
The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algren's defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

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Review:

"This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch - Mr Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful ... Mr Algren, boy, you are good." (Ernest Hemingway)

"Algren's skill brings his city to life; his writing carries you into his heart and his outraged compassion ensures that his story is as relevant now as ever." (The Observer)

"What Runyon did for New York with Guys and Dolls, Algren does for the 'windy city'....On its last page The Man with the Golden Arm lapses into - or should that be achieves - the condition of poetry, something Algren's writing was always close to." (The Herald)

"America's finest, yet most neglected writer...Nelson Algren's enduring love for the Windy City and its struggling immigrants fired his hauntingly brilliant prose....Thanks to Rebel Inc, The Man with the Golden Arm may now be remembered as Algren's work. It would be only a fragment of what he deserved." (Bizarre)

From the Back Cover:

With a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut
Afterword by Studs Terkel

"The finest American novel published since the war."
Washington Post

Winner of the first ever National Book Award, Nelson Algren's masterpiece is one of the truly ground-breaking novels to come out of twentieth-century America. Subsequently made into a film starring Frank Sinatra in its central role, The Man with the Golden Arm is a book of rare genius, an unforgettably sad portrait of a community and in particular its card-dealing, doomed protagonist, Frankie Machine, as he slowly cuts his own heart into wafer-thin slices.

The literary critic Malcolm Cowley described the novel as "Algren's defence of the individual" and Kurt Vonnegut wrote of Algren being "a master storyteller...enchanted by the hopeless". Both appreciated the book's enormous compassion and humanity and Algren's immense skill in bringing a time and place vividly to life as will any contemporary reader of this quiet powerhouse of a novel.

"A classic portrayal... stylish, atmospheric and moving"
Independent on Sunday

"A true novelist's triumph."
Time

"Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo's, an artist who ranks, with this novel, among our
best American authors."
Chicago Sun Times

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