New Chicago Classics

After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped of so many places he used to know, while the town's familiar streets, bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To convalesce, he sculpts from collected scrap metal, but his arrival in town soon rouses a young girl, Lita Avila, to curiosity. Could this reclusive and oddly quiet man, whose art is sensitive yet intense, truly be guilty of setting fire to his parents' bungalow and burning them alive? At once an homage to the urban grit of Nelson Algren and the family sagas of Leo Tolstoy, The Fugue is a true epic that spans three generations and over fifty years, a major new achievement in the history of Chicago literature. It considers the effects of war and the silent, haunting traumas inherited by children of displaced refugees. Gint Aras's lucid yet lyrical prose braids and weaves a tale where memory and imagination merge, time races and drags, and identity collapses and shifts without warning.

Andy's a bartender in North Austin in the late 1970s. For years, he's been slinging beers to corrupt cops and fat Zenith employees, but given the neighborhood's ongoing decline (and his own serious health issues), he's starting to wonder how long it can go on. He's serving workers from a dying factory in a dying neighborhood; he sees crime on the rise-and he decides to become a criminal himself. North and Central perfectly evokes Chicago in the epic winter of '78-'79-the bleak season of blizzards and disco and John Wayne Gacy-capturing the city in microcosm through the denizens of one blue-collar watering hole. If Springsteen and Bukowski had teamed up to write a story about a Chicago bar, they'd have been hard pressed to do better than this; it's an anti-Cheers, a bittersweet story about a place where everybody knows your nickname, and they're tired of you coming around because you're a degenerate. But it's more than just a static portrait; it's a gripping and moving story destined to earn its own place among the classics of Chicago literature.

Detective Art Topp has a wife...or rather, had a wife. It's hard to tell. On one hand, he talks to her every day, and she talks back. On the other, he's still in shock from the day he walked into his Triple A Detective AAAgency office and found her lifeless body riddled with bullets, the catastrophic blowback from what should have been a simple investigation. Now he's promised his daughter he's going to figure out what happened. The only problem is, he's not much of a detective-just a washed-up middle-aged former telecom worker who went to the gun range too often, watched too many episodes of The Rockford Files, and suddenly decided it'd be fun to be a private eye. Or maybe there's another problem-he also knows it might have been his fault. And the cops are starting to wonder, too... Gunmetal Blue showcases Joseph G. Peterson at his inimitable best. It's delightfully absurd and horrifyingly plausible, a sad and funny look at what happens when our airy fantasies become gritty reality, and when that reality in turn falls apart into madness and nightmares.

Alan and Audrey Taylor are an ordinary married couple raising three children and coping with the demands of busy careers when the unthinkable happens: their eldest daughter, Isabel, on the verge of precocious womanhood, goes missing in the middle of the night. Thus begins this intimate portrait of a barely functioning family as Alan, Audrey and their two young sons are left to decipher the mysteries of how to go on living and loving——in the aftermath of violence and loss. A haunting, sometimes raw exploration of grief, Morning Will Come is also by turns humorous and sexy, exploring the bonds of brotherhood and the redemptive power of love. Originally published as How to Hold a Woman by Dzanc Books in 2009, this revised edition is being published in 2020 by Tortoise Books as part of their New Chicago Classics series.

The local bar-the true, no-frills, nameless dive bar-offers its patrons a refuge, a place to express their doubts, dreams, regrets, and failures. Here they can escape or celebrate life; tell tall tales and jokes, or rage against the inherent unfairness of the human condition. Chances are you've spent time in a place like this yourself-but whether minutes or hours or years, you'll want to spend more in here. Lyrical and hypnotic, Ninety-Nine Bottles is a distillation of Joseph G. Peterson's considerable talents, and a powerful and emotional meditation on the repetitions and variations of life-regular people searching for meaning in these sad and beautiful places. Why not stop in for a few?

A former undocumented immigrant and current American citizen documents his experiences chasing the American Dream through the gig economy years as a rideshare driver in Chicago. By turns heartwarming and hilarious, this book is a valuable reminder of the values we all share. A dollar from every book sold will be donated to RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center For Education and Legal Services, or to the Ascend Educational Fund.

Meiselman has had enough. After a life spent playing by the rules, this lonely thirty-six-year-old man-"number two" at a suburban Chicago public library, in charge of events and programs, and in no control whatsoever over his fantasies about his domineering boss-is looking to come out on top, at last. What seems like an ordinary week in 2004 will prove to be a golden opportunity (at least in his mind) to reverse a lifetime of petty humiliations. And no one-not his newly observant wife, not the Holocaust survivor neighbor who regularly disturbs his sleep with her late-night gardening, and certainly not the former-classmate-turned-renowned-author who's returning to the library for a triumphant literary homecoming-will stand in his way.

After growing up with an alcoholic mother and an intermittent stepfather, Alex pines for connection, even as he sabotages his life with substances, and substitutes one failed relationship for the next. Shuffling from troubled home to chaotic institution, he narrates his strange search through Chicago's gritty gutters and lonely lakefront spaces with a voice that is clear, honest-and unforgettable. Anthony Koranda's debut Broken Bottles is earning comparisons to Denis Johnson and Nelson Algren. It's a searing debut destined for a space among the classics of Chicago literature-a story both strange and familiar about one person's path through the chaos of youth, in a quest for acceptance and hope.

Itzel's 13th birthday party starts in just about the unluckiest way possible, with her dad having a heart attack. In those frantic moments, the piñata and the frosted sheetcake and the Styrofoam cups of orange soda are forgotten; the day's highlights end up being CPR, an ambulance ride, and angioplasty. But when her father gets home from the hospital, his problems are far from over, and Itzel's are just getting started. “Nothing's Ever the Same” chronicles a young girl's coming of age in Chicago-growing up as her family grows apart. In masterful fashion, Cyn Vargas gives us a touching and memorable and universal story about a marriage on the brink and a teenager looking for love. It's a short book that packs a wallop; it's also a beautiful meditation on dysfunction and forgiveness, and all the times in life to which we can never return. The New Chicago Classics are a disparate set of titles united around a common theme: showcasing the city's up-and-coming literary talents as they produce enduring works. These excellent titles are destined to stand in the first rank of literature about the second city.

Chicago's Far North Side, a few decades ago-a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime. Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfights in back alleys on boring empty days, long walks up and down Clark Street pocketing envelopes of collection money for his older brother, Lil' Pat. It's easy enough to pretend it's all normal, until he sees Pat murder a man in a neighborhood drugstore. Now he's haunted by the memory of blood pooling on the green tiles under the flickering fluorescent lights, torn by the conflict between love of family and disgust over what they do, and desperate to survive the insanity without being swept up in it.