Praise for

The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories

“The power of Pearce’s book rises from the foundational sense of Chicago as a city of neighborhoods . . . that elevates the work of writers like Algren, Brooks, Bellow, Terkel, Cisneros, and Kotlowitz , a lineage to which this book belongs.” —Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, Paper Lantern: Love Stories

“This is a terrific collection. I savored it, one story at a time, the way I do the masters of the genre—Trevor or Munro or Gallant. Like them, Pearce creates in each short story a novel’s worth of rich characterization with deft artistic compression; and like the masters of geographically linked collections—Joyce, Anderson—Pearce renders contemporary Chicago in loving and brutal complexity from a myriad of vivid voices . . . I loved reading this book.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once

“Like James Joyce’s Dubliners, this collection of stories accumulates a strange cohesive power, and the city itself becomes a character—an arbiter, a friend, an inspiration, a tough customer. The stories are beautifully crafted and carefully written, and while the book is utterly unsentimental, a deep love of place bleeds through the prose. In a culture increasingly bent on the infantilization of its citizens, it’s rare to find a book that’s genuinely written for grown-ups—a dark, honest probing of what it means to be human and to live, right this moment, in Chicago. Barry Pearce is a shrewd, fearless writer, and The Plan of Chicago is the best book I’ve read in a long time.” —Robert Boswell, author of Mystery Ride, Tumbledown, and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards