Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren by Colin Asher

Terrific book on Nelson Algren, his childhood, his meteroric rise in prominence as a novelist, his puzzling retreat as a journalist.

On bullfighting: “It’s always a shutout for the bull.”

We are all members of one another. Algren, The Man With The Golden Gun

From his 1957 essay “Ain’t Nobody on My Side?”:

Surely never before has any people lived so tidily in the midst of such psychological disorder. Never has any people deodorized, sanitized, germproofed, cellophaned and hygienized itself so thoroughly, and still remained stuck with the sense of something dead under the house. Never have so many two-baths-a-day people gone to so many analysts to find out how to quit washing their hands. Never have so many analysts made appointments with other analysts. How can we be so satisfied that God is on our side, and at the same time be so apprehensive lest he be not?

No other people, I suspect, has set itself a moral code so rigid, while applying it so flexibly. Surely nowhere before has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. Never has any people been so completely at the mercy of its own appliances.