“This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch…Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful…Mr. Algren, boy, you are good.” —Ernest Hemingway
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- The Man with the Golden Arm
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Read by Malcolm Hillgartner
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Release Date: 6/30/09
Formats: Digital Audy
Winner of the first National Book Award in 1950, this modern classic takes us into the gritty underbelly of post–World War II America. It is the story of “Frankie Machine,” a veteran, drug addict, and card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run in Chicago’s near northwest side. Frankie has just returned from the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was exposed to all the pressures, anxieties, and temptations that had put him there in the first place.
- The Man with the Golden Arm
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Read by Malcolm Hillgartner
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Release Date: 6/30/09
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Walk on the Wild Side
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Read by Keith Szarabajka
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Release Date: 6/24/09
Formats: Digital Audy
With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed. “I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life,’” wrote Algren. “I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since.”
Perhaps the author’s own words describe this classic work best: “The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.”
- A Walk on the Wild Side
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Read by Keith Szarabajka
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Release Date: 6/24/09
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Never Come Morning
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Directed by Emily Janice Card
Read by Stefan Rudnicki
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Release Date: 1/01/06
Formats: Digital Audy
Bruno Bicek, “Lefty,” is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn’t prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime boss, the Barber. Sinister and dark, the Barber controls Steffi and has no intention of letting her go. Why should he, when he holds all the cards? Bruno and Steffi, who dream of breaking free, learn this in the end and find that for them there will be no bright morning.
- Never Come Morning
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Directed by Emily Janice Card
Read by Stefan Rudnicki
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Release Date: 1/01/06
Formats: Digital Audy