News & Reviews

WORD: 7 Stories Press publishes Nelson Algren 'lost novel'
Edited Press Release

To mark Nelson Algren's centennial birthday, 7 Stories Press published "Entrapment and Other Writings," a book that includes a long-lost unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays.

7 Stories Press noted in a press release that Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

In "Entrapment and Other Writings," Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hadn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

"Entrapment and Other Writings," edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon, is just off the press with an April 2009 publication date. Click here for more information about 7 Stories Press.

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