The Last Carousel

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.Dark Came Early in That Country 
Could World War I Have Been a Mistake? Otto Preminger’s Strange Suspenjers 
I Never Hollered Cheezit the Cops 
The Mad Laundress of Dingdong-Daddyland 
The Leak That Defied the Books 
Tinkle Hinkle and the Footnote King 
Hand in Hand Through the Greenery 
with the grabstand clowns of arts and letters
Come In If You Love Money 
Brave Bulls of Sidi Yahya 
I Know They’ll Like Me in Saigon 
Airy Persiflage on the Heaving Deep 
No Cumshaw No Rickshaw 
Letter from Saigon 
What Country Do You Think You’re In?
Police and Mama-sans Get It All 
Poor Girls of Kowloon 
After the Buffalo 
The Cortez Gang 
The House of the Hundred Grassfires 
Previous Days 
Epitaph: The Man with the Golden Arm 
The Passion of Upside-Down-Emil
A Story from Life’s Other Side
Merry Christmas Mr. Mark 
I Guess You Fellows Just Don’t Want Me 
Everything Inside Is a Penny 
The Ryebread Trees of Spring 
Different Clowns for Different Towns 
Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago 
Ballet for Opening Day: 
The Swede Was a Hard Guy
A Ticket on Skoronski 
Ode to an Absconding Bookie 
Bullring of the Summer Night 
Moon of the Arfy Darfy 
Watch Out for Daddy 
The Last Carousel 
Tricks Out of Times Long Gone“What an exhilarating experience it is to read Nelson Algren's new collection of stories!” –Chicago Sun-Times


“It's about time! When we've got a living American writer as surefooted and as fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it's almost criminal not to have something of his hard in covers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in . . . What we have here in this big fat volume is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces . . . with his hallmark stamped on every link.” –New York Times Book Review


“Essential Algren.” –Washington Post


“Very good, fast, funny and tough . . . Algren, where have you been hiding.” –San Francisco ChronicleOne of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” Recipient of the first National Book Award for Fiction and lauded by Hemingway as “one of the two best authors in America,” Algren remains among the most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, including Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning (1945), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), two short fiction collections, The Neon Wilderness (1947) and The Last Carousel (1973), a book-length prose-poem, Chicago: City on the Make (1951), and several collections of reportage. Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

SUSAN JACOBY is an independent scholar and the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), which was listed as a notable book by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and New York Times bestseller The Age of American Unreason (2008). Her reviews, articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, The American Prospect, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.