Entrapment - and Other Writings

A collection of Algren’s lost and unfinished writings, including his last novel and several stories considered to be among his masterpieces, with a new introduction by Algren's biographer Colin Asher.

"You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch. Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful." —Ernest Hemingway

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 sex workers 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. Algren admired them all for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living, their self-awareness, and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

Entrapment and Other Writings contains his unfinished last novel, previously unpublished or uncollected stories and poems, and reportage. Algren speaks to our time as few of his American contemporaries of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he was always the outsider.