Customer Reviews (1)

Book Purchase
Purchased this book for my son for his birthday from an outside retailer. Came in excellent condition and well packed. ... Read more

Product Description
Now in paperback, the "amazing" (Los Angeles Times) and "engrossing" (Publishers Weekly) love letters of Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren. Called "intimate, intelligent, and sincere" by The New Yorker, the more than three hundred love letters written by Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren after their love-at-first-sight meeting in 1947 are collected for the first time in A Transatlantic Love Affair. A unique cross between a personal memoir and an insider's intellectual history of Left Bank life in post-war Paris, this "tender and intimate" (Booklist) collection chronicles their passionate affair, spanning twenty years and four continents. Penned as she was writing The Mandarins, America Day by Day, and The Second Sex, the letters provide a new backdrop for those now classic works. Frank, tender, and often humorous, they are praised by The Nation as "fascinating" and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "reveal[ing] a lighter, funnier, and more physically sensuous de Beauvoir than we are used to."Amazon.com Review
Simone de Beauvoir met Nelson Algren in Chicago in February1947, when a mutual friend arranged for him to serve as her tour guidefor two days. The attraction was immediate, and within two months theywere in love. Because Algren was so alien to de Beauvoir's world, shespent time describing events and people to him she might otherwisehave taken for granted. The result is that de Beauvoir's 300 survivingletters to Algren are unusually rich in detail--love letters with aconscious undercurrent of French social history. Translated andannotated by Kate Leblanc, they offer amusing insights into postwarParisian life and characters, delivered with the charm of thenonnative writer.

In one letter, de Beauvoir sums up Albert Camus as "aninteresting but difficult guy. When he was not pleased with the bookhe was writing, he was very arrogant; now, he has got a rather greatsuccess and he has become very modest and sincere." She coollydescribes a dinner party where she witnessed the separation of theapexes of mind and body: "Sartre was alone in a corner, eatingsadly some corned-beef, and I sat in front of Rita Hayworth, trying tospeak to her, and looking at her beautiful shoulders and breasts whichcould have made so many men crazy but which were so useless forme." This is essential reading for devotees of the Paris literaryscene and other literary romantics. --Regina Marler ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Fantastic book with insights into de Beauvoir's character
To correct the reader from Brookline, this book is exactly the same as "Beloved Chicago Man"- it's the same book with different titles in the US and the UK.As the reviewers below state, this is a great window into the relationship between Algren & de Beauvoir, and shows the truth feelings of de Beauvoir.

Tiresome, Repetitive, Naive
Having read all of De Beauvoir's autobiographies, this book was disappointing. The content can only be described as a mere extension of 'Beloved Chicago Man' (again relating to her relationship with Nelson Algren). In the latter, the letters to Algren are immediatly captivating, but quickly become repetitive rather than developed and by the end seem embarrassingly girlish and naive leaving a strong feeling of voyeuristic intrusion. This latest publication is an unnecessary extension of Beloved Chicago Man.

Exceptional Characters, Universal Human Conditions
This tome unites fascinating, ethereal elements of time and place with the more mundane features of long-distance love.

First, the unique bits of which only Simone de Beauvoir can honestly write:The intellectual sceneof post-WWII Paris, firsthand knowledge of Camus and Sartre, a complexnetwork of friendships mixing the communities of European intelligentsia,fascists, existentialists, writers, and actors.Then, of course, there isthe head-over-heels love in which she found herself with Nelson Algren,noted American author, immediately upon making his acquaintance.All ofthese interesting facets add spice to this book.

Surprisingly, what trulymakes this book unforgettable, impossible to put down, at timesembarrassing in its candor and recognizable to the reader are its themes ofcommonality to everyone else on the planet.Anyone who has ever fallen inlove, suffered instant infatuation for another, missed the touch of afar-away lover, or slogged through a long-distance relationship willrelate/commiserate/understand/anticipate both the words and the feelingsbehind them.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote all of these letters to NelsonAlgren in English (not her native French); happily, the misspellings andgrammatical errors are preserved without correction.The reader will noteprogressive improvement in her English abilities as the correspondencelengthens and her relationship matures.

I believe all readers will findthese pages touching, satisfying, and intriguing.Those of you who haveexperienced long-distance passion will enjoy the letters as well, but withthe distinct pain of knowing the inevitable conclusion in advance.

Amazing insights in de Beauvoir
This book gives a real insight into de Beauvoir's character- after reading these letters, one will never again look upon her as a cold intellectual.If anything, they show that the passion she felt with Algren could notcompare to whatever sort of relationship she had with Sartre.Reveals deBeauvoir's true self more than any of her autobiographies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

another Beauvoir
A very beautiful book which reveals another Simon de beauvoir: the one in love. She's passionate, sincere, writing with her heart to his "beloved" transatlantic love. They met in America when Simon cameto give a cycle of conferences around the States, and they started to writefrom this moment. We see how their love rises, how they open their heartsletter by letter, and we realize that her love was nothing but authentic.It's also a very interesting reading about life in Paris among theintellectuals of the time, the day by day with Sartre and their travellingtogether around the world. You really get in touch with this time and thiscircle of people. Very touching. ... Read more

Product Description
Nelson Algren lived a life of extremes - from a Texas jail to Sartre's Paris and a love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Skid Row soup kitchens to Hollywood champagne parties and from public censorship to the National Book Award. This biography coincides with several reissues of his novels. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of the letters of Simone de Beauvoir, written in English to her lover Nelson Algren. They provide a portrait of the love of a man and woman in their forties, as well as an account of de Beauvoir's life in the 1950s and friendships with Camus, Colette and Genet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Exactly the same as "Transatlantic Love Affair"
This a great book, which really shows the true character of Simone de Beauvoir.See the many positive reviews of "A Transatlantic Love Affair"- it is the same book."Beloved Chicago Man" is merely the title by this British publisher.Don't get both! ... Read more

Product Description

The books seeks to examine changes in the U.S.--literary, aesthetic, and social--as represented in novels set in an environment where the gamut of ethnicities and their often differing views of literature and culture that make up the U.S. are more generally found, using the theories and concepts of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his concept of the chronotope, or spacetime.

Product Description
Larry McMurtry once wrote that Nelson Algren held the best literary claim to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, though few people realize that "the poet of the Chicago slums" ever lived or wrote here. Yet it was in Depression-era Texas that Algren developed his instinctive need to speak for the powerless--a need that made him one of the foremost chroniclers of the American outcast. The Texas that Algren understood was a world where impoverished people lived among simmering yet casual violence, a world where the law--racist, abusive, and corrupt--ruled with an utter ruthlessness and power. The Texas Stories vividly re-creates this now-vanished world. The collection includes "So Help Me," winner of a 1935 O'Henry Award; "The Last Carousel," which won the 1972 Playboy Fiction Award; and the early "Thundermug," a piece that was censored when it appeared in the radical Windsor Quarterly in 1935. Here too is Algren's unique retelling of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde. Including work from more than four decades, The Texas Stories provides a much-needed overview of Algren's artistic development. It will be enthusiastically welcomed by Algren fans, Texans, literary scholars, Western historians, and many others. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Better examples of his short stoties elswhere
The majority of the short stories in this book areearly attempts of parts of his first novel: Somebody in boots. These stories show the promise of the writer to come, but, unless you are a ardent fan, there are bettercollections of his short stories than this on the market.

30's era "Texas Stories" rings with a contemporary resonance
"The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren." Edited and with an introduction by Bettina Drew. University of Texas Press, 1995

In "Texas Stories", Nelson Algren - the"bard of the stumblebum" best known for his 1949 novel "The Man With The Golden Arm" - peoples his hardscrabble vignettes with the flotsam and jetsam of Depression-era America ; characters who obsessively drift across the desolate and windswept Texas landscape like so many sagebrushes tumbling down the gullies of a prairie ghost town.

But even though the tramps, loners, carnival hustlers, whores, illiterate Okies and Mexican convicts on the run gathered in these 14 short stories and sketches written at different stages of Algren's long career belong to an era long since passed, "Texas Stories" rings with a surprisingly contemporary resonance.

This is because Algren, who died in 1981, blends a sharply honed psychology with his trenchant social protest, avoiding cheap sentimentality by focusing as equally on the tragic-comic and grotesque aspects of his character's motives as he does on the underlying economic and social wrongs that have sent them spinning to their fate.

At his best, in short stories like "Kewpie Doll", the balance works superbly. Here a mundane, almost descriptive account of a boisterous crowd of poverty-stricken rural towns people pilfering a train for winter coal yields sharply to a horrifying conclusion - the decapitation of a child on the tracks as the train takes off, all the more tragic for its seeming randomness.

Curtis Price

Baltimore, USA

cansv@igc.apc.org

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Customer Reviews (1)

Inspiring, masculine, great B/W photos!
In essence, this glorious book will convert you into a boxing enthusiast even though you're not. ... Read more