Literary Collections

Part of Belt's Neighborhood Guidebook Series, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook is an intimate exploration of the Windy City's history and identity. Required reading--The Chicago Tribune

Officially, Chicago has 77 neighborhoods. Unofficially, though, that number's closer to 200. But what does that mean for the people who actually call Chicago home? In an eclectic collection of essays, poems, photos, and visual art, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook aims to explore the city's overlooked corners. Edited by Martha Bayne, and with help from the Read/Write Library, the book builds on 2017's critically acclaimed Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology. Here, you'll find compelling stories from all over the city:

- What one pizzeria meant to a boy growing up in Ashburn

- The South Shore's beauty and pain

- The best borscht in Ukranian Village

- The alleys of the Gold Coast

- Rogers Park's ever-shifting identity.

This lyrical and subjective guide to Chicago features work by Megan Stielstra, Audrey Petty, Alex Hernandez, Sebastián Hidalgo, Dmitry Samarov, Ed Marszewski, Lily Be, Jonathan Foiles, and many more. It's a book about the day-to-day lives of people in the city and above all else, about the changes those people have witnessed, suffered, and enacted.

In this idiosyncratic guidebook, Chicagoans will recognize both their streets and their stories, and readers from outside the city will get an intimate portrait of one of America's most iconic cities.

Screw Capital of the World. Forest City. Home of the Rockford Peaches of A League of Their Own fame. Rockford, Illinois, has many identities, most oriented toward the past. These days, the fastener industry has mostly rusted away, the trees are less plentiful than they once were, and professional women’s baseball is no more. What defines Rockford today?

 

According to The Rockford Anthology, it’s the people. Those who grew up here, who came by choice or by circumstance, or who decided to leave. People who lost someone or found a voice or built community here.

 

In this installment of Belt’s City Anthology series, the people of Rockford represent themselves in essays, poetry, and photographs. Here, you’ll meet someone who found the space to start a business after leaving the crowd in Chicago. Academy Award–nominee Bing Liu takes you on a personal tour of his childhood houses and the ghosts that lurk there. A local attorney and activist shares how the city pushed back when ICE wanted to bring a detention center to Rockford. And you’ll learn why New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby, stand-up comedian Ashley Ray-Harris, and an introverted expat living in Taiwan always say they’re from Rockford . . . not Chicago. Whether through stories of growing up or chronicles of fights to make the city better, a sense of Rockford’s present—and future—starts to come into focus.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series. A lively grab bag of essays, fiction and poetry that reads at times like a who's who of contemporary Chicago writers/residents.--The Chicago Tribune

Chicago is a city built on meat, railroads, and steel, on opportunity and exploitation. But its identity has long involved so much more than manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization.

The problems that plague the region don't disappear once you pass the Indiana border, though. In fact, they're often amplified. And Chicago is a complicated city because of that, defined by movement that's the anchor of the Midwest, but bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy.

Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the region at large, and the elements that set it apart. With contributions from writers like Aleksandar Hemon, Kathleen Rooney, and Zoe Zolbrod, and here you'll find stories about:

- Buying Bread on Devon Street

- The Cantinas of Pilsen

- Bike commutes through the North Side

- Adventures on the El.

Writing with affection, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers in this collection capture all the harmony and dissonance that define one cacophonous place.

A wide-ranging insider's look at one of the world's most iconic cities.

Japanese Americans who choose to reside in Chicago consider it to be the best city in the world. The first Japanese arrived in the city to prepare for the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the building of the Ho-o-den Pavilion. Prior to World War II, only a few hundred Japanese Americans lived in Chicago; however, during the War many were brought from concentration camps to help with the war effort. The number of Japanese-American residents peaked at more than 20,000 by 1945, with half of them returning to their west coast homes when permitted. For those who remained, the acceptance and employment opportunities found in Chicago offered a chance to begin new lives in a more ethnically-diverse city. These recollections, told through the medium of historic photographs, expose what is at the heart of Chicago's Japanese-American community-a deep commitment to patriotism and a devotion to country and civil rights. This book of more than 200 vintage images reveals for the first time aspects of Japanese-American life in Chicago over four generations, through the eyes of those who lived it.

In 1976, a small group of Irish Americans was looking for a permanent place to celebrate and share its heritage and culture. After many fundraisers and Irish Family Days, they purchased an abandoned, graffiti-covered building on the northwest side of Chicago. Over the past 25 years, a crew of passionate volunteers has transformed the derelict structure into a premier institution. Through dance, music, festivals, language, history, and art, the Irish American Heritage Center delivers on its mission as a nonprofit organization enhancing the lives of every member and the community. But for the vision of those original dreamers, and the blood, sweat, and tears of the thousands of volunteers, it would not exist.

Here is the black Chicago family album, of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and ""goin' to Chicago"" to find the American Dream.

The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. ""The first white man here was a black man,"" Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago's first non-Indian settler. It's all here: from the site of DuSable's cabin--now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile--to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga's bank, Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and ""goin' to Chicago"" to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the ""Second City,"" but black Chicago is second to none.

From musicians and mobsters to mayors and men of the cloth, discover the fascinating history of Chicago's Irish history.

The history of the Irish in Chicago goes back to the days when the city was little more than an outpost on the prairie shores of Lake Michigan. Drawn by opportunities in the growing frontier town, Irish men and women who were fleeing economic hardship and famine in Ireland were quick to make their mark on Chicago's political, religious, and economic life. The unique position of the Irish among immigrant groups-English speaking and more culturally attuned to Anglo-American institutions, yet Catholic-allowed them to flourish in occupations and social positions for which they have become known. Most notably, the Irish in Chicago have produced eight mayors and many bishops. But Irish Chicago is also the story of those who built and enlivened the city: the policemen, firemen, priests, nuns and brothers, tavern owners, educators, transit workers, musicians, and ward politicians made good, and the north, south, and west side neighborhoods and parishes they inhabited.

From dancing at Hanley's House of Happiness to raising pints at Kelly's Pub on St. Patrick's Day, the history of the Irish community in Chicago is told through stories of its gathering places. Families are drawn to the pub after Sunday church, in the midst of sporting events, following funerals, and during weddings. In good times and bad, the pub has been a source of comfort, instruction, and joy—a constant in a changing world. Based on interviews with tavern owners, musicians, bartenders, and scholars, Chicago's Historic Irish Pubs explores the way the Irish pub defines its block, its neighborhood, and its city.

Koreans first began to immigrate to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Drawn to the Windy City in search of a better life for themselves and their families, Korean Americans quickly began to establish what has become a thriving community that remains active and distinct. For the past 100 years, the Korean American community has contributed greatly to the growth and development of the Chicago metropolitan area-politically, culturally, and socially. In this book Korean Americans in Chicago celebrate these contributions with over 200 photographs that detail the various aspects of life within the community.

The first wave of Chinese immigrants came to Chicagoland in the 1870s, after the transcontinental railway connected the Pacific Coast to Chicago. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented working-class Chinese from entering the U.S., except men who could prove they were American citizens. For more than 60 years, many Chinese immigrants had acquired documents helping to prove that they were born in America or had a parent who was a citizen. The men who bore these false identities were called "paper sons." A second wave of Chinese immigrants arrived after the repeal of the Act in 1943, seeking economic opportunity and to be reunited with their families.

Considered to be one of the largest neighborhood-based St. Patrick's Day parades outside Dublin, Chicago's South Side Irish Parade began quite modestly, with 17 children under the age of 10 marching twice around the block.

Dubbing themselves the ""Wee Ones of Washtenaw and Talman,"" the founders of this great parade marched with homemade signs, costumes, and a baby buggy while neighbors and family members cheered them on. Over the next 31 years, the parade grew into an annual event, attracting hundreds of thousands who came to celebrate Irish heritage with family and friends. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama encouraged Taoiseach Brian Cowen of Ireland to visit the parade, calling it ""one of the great events in America.""