The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook
9781948742498
Regular price $24.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook offers an intimate, idiosyncratic look at the third-largest city in the country, exploring community history and identity in a global city through essays, poems, photo essays, and art articulating the lived experience of its residents.
What did one pizzeria mean to a boy growing up in Ashburn? How can South Shore encompass so much beauty and so much pain? Where’s the best borscht in Ukrainian Village? Who’s got a handle on the ever-shifting identity of Rogers Park? All this and more is explored in this lyrical, subjective, completely non-comprehensive guide to Chicago.
With contributions from more than forty writers, including Megan Stielstra, Audrey Petty, Dmitry Samarov, Lily Be, and many others, covering forty-three of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, it is a snapshot of a city at an inflection point, representing grassroots history at its finest—and a must for anyone keen to understand what makes Chicago tick.
“Required reading.” —Chicago Tribune
“Stirring, entertaining and informative . . . [Brings] to vivid life the diverse people and wildly divergent experiences that populate Chicago.” —Chicago Detours
Rust Belt Chicago
9780997774375
Regular price $20.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%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.
Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the Midwest at large, and the elements that set it apart. With contributions from writers like Aleksandar Hemon, Kathleen Rooney, and Zoe Zolbrod, 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.
Midwest Futures
9781953368089
Regular price $16.95 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%What does the future hold for the Midwest?
A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic new book, ambiguity might be the region's defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into 36 brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.
The New Midwest
9780997774283
Regular price $16.95 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell to Stewart O’Nan this book is a call to rethink the way we conceive Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to every reading list.
“Using the lens of novels and short stories published over the past 30 or so years, Athitakis seeks to illuminate the ways we still lean on literary mythology of the Midwest when it comes to defining the region.” —Chicago Tribune
“[The New Midwest] rightly praises the Midwestern novels of Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen, but also points out works of comparable merit that warrant rediscovery.” —The Washington Post
“The New Midwest is a crisp, engaging tip sheet and guide for further reading.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“A journey through the Midwest and through some key works by writers [Athitakis] thinks are most effectively using the region in their fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews