\u2014 Heathcote Williams<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a byte of self promotion. A byte? Haw. From the jacket blurb: Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, \u201cif his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall\u201d? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren\u2019s golden arm with which to write this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13356","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-literature","8":"category-news","9":"category-political-culture","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/TICKETcovera-front-COLD-TURKEY335.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-3tq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/TICKETcovera-front-COLD-TURKEY335.jpg\" "\\"TICKET")
<\/a>Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, \u201cif his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall\u201d? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren\u2019s golden arm with which to write this riveting, gonzo mini-biography of the man Hemingway called \u201cthe best novelist in America after William Faulkner.\u201d Algren was being translated by Jean-Paul Sartre while he was sleeping with Sartre’s wife and he preferred to spend time in boxing gyms than to hang round literary cocktail parties. He had enough chutzpah to place a whole city, Chicago, in the opposing corner of the ring and to give it a bloody nose and a sore head for treating him as an outsider \u2013 an outsider who wrote twenty-four hours a day and who faced exile for, as his friend Kurt Vonnegut noted, \u201cwriting that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were.\u201d \u2014 Heathcote Williams<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"