"The Neon Wilderness" by Nelson Algren (1947)

I can't tell if stories about low-lifes, drunks, petty criminals, gamblers, brawlers, down-and-out Polacks, prostitutes, Dagos who refer to themselves as Dagos, liars, strippers, and general good-for-nothing ragamuffins are inherently boring, or whether Algren's writing style makes their lives feel boring (they all seem to speak in the exact same clipped, late night Chicago slang, to the point where it all grows cartoonish; outside of that, sometimes the narrator launches into odd, out-of-place poetic flourishes; and even outside of that, the characters' names all have an odd, Aaron Sorkin-like plasticity to them.) A lot has been made about how Algren focused on the lives of people who tend to get overlooked. At the same time, a criminal who doesn't think about much besides committing crimes, and a gambler who doesn't think about much besides gambling, for instance, really aren't all that interesting, no matter how eventful their lives are on the surface, no matter how much blood gets spilled. Maybe the reason all these lives are overlooked in literature isn't because us privileged straights prefer to avert our eyes away from the shadowed corners of the city. Maybe it's because the lives you find there, at the heart of it, sound really fucking boring. Which, again, might be entirely Algren's fault. One star.

"Never Come Morning" by Nelson Algren (1942)

I know this is an early book, but if I were to explain why I think Nelson Algren isn't nearly as good a writer as some seem to think (mostly people who hail from Chicago) it's not because he isn't capable of turning a nicely poetic phrase, it's that he tends to overwrite what probably should be underwritten and underwrite what probably should be overwritten—in other words, I think his writing instincts are wildly off. One star.

"Nonconformity - Writing on Writing" by Nelson Algren (1996)

A humanist railing against how "being American" is a dehumanizing force, a treatise teetering on the edge of unhinged rage. Good thing I didn't really get into Algren when I was younger. Because if I did I would probably now be dead—I didn't really need an avowed nonconformist to fan my flames; if so, I would have exploded. Three stars.