Friday's "Forgotten" Books: NELSON ALGREN'S OWN BOOK OF LONESOME MONSTERS (also published as 13 MASTERPIECES OF BLACK HUMOR)

From the Contento Index:

Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters ed. Nelson Algren (Lancer 73-409, 1962, 60¢, 192pp, pb)

7 · Preface · Nelson Algren · pr
11 · A World Full of Great Cities · Joseph Heller · ss Great Tales of City Dwellers, ed. Alex Austin, Lion Library Editions, 1955
24 · Talk to Me, Talk to Me · Joan Kerckhoff · ss, 1962
34 · Show Biz Connections · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss, 1962
44 · Hundred Dollar Eyes · Bernard Farbar · ss, 1962
54 · The Man Who Knew What Ethopia Should Do About Her Water Table · H. E. F. Donohue · ss The Carleton Miscellany, 1961
68 · Among the Dangs · George P. Elliott · nv Esquire Jun ’58
95 · Peacetime · Brock Brower · ss, 1961
111 · The Shores of Schizophrenia · Hughes Rudd · ss, 1961
120 · Day of the Alligator · James Blake · ss The Paris Review #17 ’57
136 · Address of Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago · Saul Bellow · ss The Hudson Review, 1951
143 · The Closing of This Door Must Be Oh, So Gentle · Chandler Brossard · ss The Dial, 1962
157 · Entropy · Thomas Pynchon · ss The Kenyon Review Spr ’60
173 · The House of the Hundred Grassfires · Nelson Algren · ss, 1956

So, you want to talk noir...if there's a concept in "darkness" that can be as argued about and misconstrued as noir, it's probably "black humor." Grotesquerie, biting satire, modest proposals. This book is a handsome sample of what was available in 1962, assembled by the writer best remembered for The Man with the Golden Arm, but who should be remembered for a much wider range of work, including the story that he immodestly caps this anthology with. As with Joe David Bellamy's SuperFiction from a decade later or Dwight Macdonald's fat Parodies from a couple of years before, this has been a widely-distributed anthology touching on the fantastic and the grimly realistic, surfiction and some stuff that at least verges on metafiction. Saul Bellow, not usually thought of as a comic writer (though his wit was just one of his many facets) delivers what might be the slightest and lightest piece here; Hughes Rudd, in the 1970s the acerbic anchor of the CBS Morning News (which was actually more or less a news program, imagine) gives him a run for that laurel (any joking aside, CBS News had several fictioneers on staff in those years, including Reid Collins on the radio side). George Elliott's "Among the Dangs" is straight-up science fiction enough to have been reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before its appearance here, and Pynchon's "Entropy" might've been squeezed in without too much forcing the issue. The Heller is from a fine, pioneering Lion Books all-originals paperback anthology, and Joan Kerchoff probably shouldn't be the only woman to be represented in the book (how many Dororthy Parkers did he pass by? No Mary McCarthy?), but it's a solid, grimly funny read (and not only grimly funny) under either of the titles Lancer Books, that ultimately doomed publisher, chose to reissue it (Bernard Geis Associates did the hardcover, which I've never seen). Somebody else should; it's been gone too long.

Please Patti Abbott's blog for more "Forgotten" books for this Friday.