Golden Arm

Lazarus Weathers, a high school senior from the wrong side of the tracks, seeks to protect his half-brother while pitching his way out of poverty, one strike at a time.

A novel about a young drug addict and his daily encounters as he pursues his eternal quest for means to support his habit.

Originally published: New York: Viking, 2015.

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algren's defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

The Man with the Golden Arm is Nelson Algren's most powerful and enduring work. On the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949, for which Algren was honored with the first National Book Award (which he received from none other than Eleanor Roosevelt at a ceremony in March 1950), Seven Stories is proud to release the first critical edition of an Algren work. A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algren's defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. Special contributions by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

Calamitous Corruption: The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy Book 3: The Precinct With The Golden Arm “A superbly plotted, Chandleresque historical Noir”–Lilja Sigurðardóttir, “the Queen of Scandinavian Crime Fiction,” author of the trilogy Snare, Trap, Cage and of four financial thrillers, the latest of which is Dark As Night “Private detective Harry Palmer, a distant relative of Philip Marlow and Lew Archer, takes us back to the LA of the 1940s in an exciting story with an impressive accumulation of details from the backstreets of that city” – Gunnar Staalesen, who Jo Nesbo called “the Norwegian Chandler,” writer of the Varg Veum series “Dennis Broe compels us to assert that novelists, like himself—and not just poets—are the unacknowledged legislators: for in this masterpiece, he poetically provides a scintillating dissection of capitalism, L.A. style”—Gerald Horne, historian and author of Class Struggle in Hollywood “…the seamy world of the LAPD,…the Mexican-American community in Boyle Heights…the Ku Klux Klan and the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry…combine and collide in a cleverly integrated story that will keep a reader fully engaged to the last page and beyond”–Eric Gordon, LA Progressive “An ingeniously plotted book that weaves its plots together well, and gives us another fascinating look at mid-century Los Angeles”—Ellen Clair Lamb, assistant editor Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels “The Precinct With The Golden Arm outlines an LA teeming with corruption end to end, and one–same as it ever was–not that different from the city today with many of the same problems still unresolved and thus recurring”–Crime Time In his third encounter with the seamy world of the LA power structure of the 1940s, disgraced ex-homicide detective Harry Palmer tangles with the LAPD as it attempts to shed its aura of corruption while clamping down on the Mexican American community of Boyle Heights in the wake of the Zoot Suit Rebellion. Lurking in the background is a burgeoning Big Pharma industry as these various threads interconnect and lead Harry into a maze of sex and drugs as he confronts his own tarnished past.