Barry Pearce - "The Plan of Chicago" - Garin Cycholl

Barry Pearce will discuss The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories. He will be joined in conversation by Garin Cycholl. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here — please note your RSVP is requested but not required.

About the book: The Plan of Chicago has an unusual structure – nine linked stories set in nine Chicago neighborhoods – and unusual range. The characters – half men, half women – include immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Ireland, and Somalia. They work as housepainters, taxi drivers, sketch artists, and scam artists – often exploited by or exploiting others to make it in an unforgiving city. Chicago features heavily in these characters’ plans, though the plan of Chicago – shaped by divisions of race, class, gender, violence – often forces them apart. Despite that division, incongruous lives intersect here in unexpected ways. An Irish tradesman in a changing neighborhood struggles with the complications of befriending an African American coworker. His boss’s self-absorbed wife, a Polish immigrant, learns to count people in new ways working for the U.S. Census. A Romanian boy who helps his father fake accidents tests the limits of filial loyalty, and the insurance claims adjustor investigating his case confronts dark baggage when his partner works with rape victims. Through these varied characters – Black and White, straight and gay, wealthy and working-class – Pearce captures the breadth and depth of the city that sits dead center in America and perhaps better than any other, can reveal its promise and flaws.

About the author: Barry Pearce’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up with six siblings. He graduated with a degree in journalism from Northwestern University – the first in his family to attend college – and earned an MFA in creative writing at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. He has won the Nelson Algren Award Grand Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Award, and The Mercedes Delos Jacobs Book Prize. Pearce lives in Chicago, where he ghostwrites nonfiction books and occasionally teaches. Visit his website at http://www.barrypearce.com

About the interlocutor: Garin Cycholl’s novel, Rx, is a play on Melville's The Confidence-Man, about a man practicing medicine without a license in a (Dis)united States.  prairie)d is the last volume among his Illinois poems, which include Blue Mound to 161, Hostile Witness, and The Bonegatherer. Together as “local epic,” these book-length poems play with aspects of memory, myth, and place.