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A Walk on the Wild Side
 
 

A Walk on the Wild Side (Paperback)

by Nelson Algren (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Inc; Reprint edition (12 Oct 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0374525323
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374525323
  • Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 14 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,860,642 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #24 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Algren, Nelson

Product Description

Review
"The intensity of his feeling, the accuracy of his thought, make me wonder if any other writer of our time has shown us more exactly the human basis of our democracy. Though Algren often defines his positive values by showing us what happens in their absence, his hell burns with passion for heaven."--"The New York Times Book Review"
""A Walk on the Wild Side" . . . deserves to read by every "Catch-22 "and" Cuckoo's Nest" freak just so they can find out what opened the door for [these] two novels . . . It's not only that before Heller and Kesey there was Algren. It's that Algren is where they came from."--"Rolling Stone"
"Mr. Algren, boy, you are good."--"Ernest Hemingway"


Ernest Hemingway
"Mr Algren, boy, you are good." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Algren's masterpiece, 5 Dec 2008
By M. Keane - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.

Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.

This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.
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3 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Style Suffocates Substance, 8 Mar 2002
By A Customer
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. A picaresque tale of the 'adventures' of a young southern pauper on the road to maturity, it is told in a ponderous, plodding style that strives for prose-poetry but ends up as patronizing guff. Algren is at one remove from his characters, staring at them like a biologist eyeing microbes through a lens, with the fatal result that we, the readers, don't connect with them. To be honest, it was a relief to finish this book; if you want to see this genre properly served, check out Charles Bukowski, or John and Dan Fante.
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