Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

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Summary: Only pretentious dweebs title their online reviews
Review: I've been writing for ten years and this book has become a bible for me. I planned on reading one chapter one night before going to bed, and instead stayed up until dawn reading it and thinking about what the author's compelling essays. It's the best book I've ever read about the art of writing and the responsibility of writers.

It used to be much easier to submit reviews. These days every company pretends like its website is the only one people will ever visit on the web. Gack.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass
Review: This book stalks sure footed through the dense thicket of modern American literature, with The Novel and Nelson Algren firmly at its center. It is at once entirely personal and, sonehow, universal at the same time. What it has to say about about writing evokes the kindred spirit shared by all great writiers, vastlty differing though thier style and temperments might be. Each exquisitely realized chapter is peppered with excerpts of their prose in such a way that it fairly leaps off the page, providing a critical mass of context and vibrancy to the very difficult subject of what it is that writers do and do best. Get it. Read it. Love it. I certainly did.

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Summary: Timeless Algren Still Loud and Clear
Review: Written with furious urgency, sharp economy, and timeless resonance, Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing is an often bleak, yet always sentient book-length essay on the role of artists, particularly writers, who work from, about, and for an American culture that doesn't value the significance of artistic contribution, and that actually rejects and fears artistic expression when it moves against the forces of pious consumerism, blind nationalism, and disconnected apathy. Back in Algren's day, those forces were personified by names like McCarthy and McCarran, Sheen and Oursler; today they're Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, Limbaugh and Savage. And the Red Scare of Algren's world had turned into today's "Arabic threat" that fosters needless suspicion and faith in puppet leaders who call for roundups of the innocent. Algren Bolsters his insights with a barrage of memorable quotes from the Masters: Dostoevsky, Twain, and most importantly, Fitzgerald--none of whom, it seems, ever worked in the comfort of societal/institutional trust and acceptance, no matter how well known they were. Will there ever be comfort for the writer? "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is for armed robbery," Algren explains. There are many, many more forces working against the writer today, especially against the young and unknown: fewer venues to reach the respect of an audience, and a culture that would much rather spend its time in front of the television, at the movies, or on the internet--but rarely on moving works of complex, serious literature. No writers have ever had it easy, and if you're in for the long haul of lonely obscurity, this book is good company to keep. Algren is empowering. His thesis is louder, clearer, and more important than ever.