Showing results by narrator "Richard Poe" in All Categories

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: “Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.” In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society....

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete, and Chicago.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

When New Orleans District Attorney Kirsten Lord and her nine-year-old daughter are imperiled by a chillingly believable death threat, Lord has no other choice but to accept the Witness Protection Program's offer to hide them in Boulder, Colorado. There, they meet program veteran Carl Luppo, a solitary mob hit man who is tormented by his former life and has nothing but time for regret. Sensing that Lord and her daughter's safety has been compromised, Luppo takes on the role of sentinel, fully realizing this might be his last shot at redemption

The brutal slaying of Boulder's controversial DA strikes deep in the heart of everything clinical psychologist Alan Gregory holds dear: after all, Gregory's wife Lauren worked for the dead man. But the bloodied body is just the first in a series of high-voltage incidents in a gripping story of crime and punishment, tragedy and retribution—and of human beings caught in the shattering cross fire of forces beyond their control...forces sometimes within themselves.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.