[In the following excerpt, the critic praises the short stories in The Last Carousel and discusses the similarities between Algren's fiction and nonfiction.]

Nelson Algren hasn't written any novels for going on 20 years now—which is sad in a way. But it's not like he's been exactly idle in the years between: The Last Carousel is the third collection of short pieces he has published since his last novel. Unlike the other two (Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Diary), this one contains a lot of short fiction. There is a sad-funny section on whore-house life that had been cut from A Walk on the Wild Side, titled "The House of the Hundred Grassfires." And there are a good-sized handful of short stories that have appeared over the years in Playboy and some other places. What can I say? They are very good. I could insert some specifics at this point, and maybe I should. The title story, "The Last Carousel," for instance, perfectly captures the seedy atmosphere of the carnival. "Watch Out for Daddy" and "The Mad Laundress of Ding Dong Daddyland" treat addictions of different sorts. And "Dark Came Early in That Country," the first story in the book and my favorite of the lot, is as good as anything I've read on the crummy world of boxing since Fat City. There are more, and I wonder why he didn't make a separate book of them. One that could carry the label, "Short Fiction by Nelson Algren," would have far greater impact, I should think, than this big bag of mixed pieces.

One reason he may have decided to put them all together is that Algren's journalism is a little hard to tell from his fiction. They look a lot alike. Algren puts himself right in the middle of his non-fiction, too, sets scenes beautifully, and tells it all with dialogue and colorful details interwoven through the narrative. In other words, to give it a recently-stylish label, it's New Journalism—and Nelson Algren was writing it this way whem Tom Wolfe was still at Yale working on his PhD in American Studies. This being the case and with journalism being exalted today in some quarters high above fiction as a mode of serious expression, I can't for the life of me figure out why he hasn't retained greater eminence. The feeling persists that if he lived someplace else he would be one of the Great Men of American Letters, holder of fellowships, dispenser of wisdom.

For that vast indifference felt in Chicago for the rest of the country, is very widely reciprocated. In good circles, Chicago has the reputation of being a smelly place populated by rude people. This it largely deserves. But it is more than only that, and if you want to find out how much more, you might start out by reading Mike Royko and Nelson Algren.