Collection coming in November 2025
The Plan of Chicago has an unusual structure – nine linked stories set in nine labelled Chicago neighborhoods – and unusual range. The characters – half men, half women – include immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Ireland, 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. They are black and white and brown, straight and gay, wealthy and working-class. My goal was to capture the breadth and character of the city that sits dead-center in America and perhaps better than any other, can serve as its stand-in.
Chicago features heavily in these characters’ plans, though the plan of Chicago – shaped by divisions of race, class, gender, violence – often forces them apart. Incongruous lives also 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 must confront dark baggage when his partner begins working with rape victims.
“If only the people of a city could know how necessary they are for each other, they could heal each other and be healed in turn. Will the richly realized characters herein grasp this salvation? Either way, through Barry Pearce’s art, we may. Resonant, empathetic, and continually surprising, The Plan of Chicago is a glorious, living map by a master storyteller.”
Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium
“The form of Barry Pearce’s compelling linked collection of stories, The Plan of Chicago, mirrors the city. Each story is allied with a Chicago neighborhood. “Chez Whatever,” his haunting Nelson Algren Prize-winning story, is connected to South Shore, and there are stories paired with Rogers Park, Humboldt Park, Uptown, and others. The pairing is not merely a clever scaffolding device. The power of Pearce’s book rises from the foundational sense of Chicago as a city of neighborhoods. Neighborhood is the level where the great urban themes—race, ethnicity, minority culture, assimilation, inequality, democracy, the American Dream—that elevate the work of writers like Algren, Brooks, Bellow, Terkel, Cisneros, and Kotlowitz have been expressed, a lineage to which this book belongs.”
Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, Paper Lantern: Love Stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories
“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
“The Plan of Chicago is a tapestry of interconnected stories exploring the intricate intersections of love, identity, and the desperate gambles we take to survive and belong. Set in 21st-century post-industrial Chicago, where lives teeter between chaos and connection, these narratives delve into the complexities of human vulnerability—how past choices and present fears shape us, how love both binds and breaks, and how moments of crisis reveal the raw, unfiltered truths of who we are. With themes of familial bonds, the longing for acceptance, and the recklessness of youth, Barry Pearce’s story collection captures the tender, often tumultuous journey of growing up and growing wise.”
Achy Obejas, author of Boomerang / Bumerán and Days of Awe
“Barry Pearce’s Chicago tales cut across the certainties of seasonal change and static divisions in search of connection upon a sprawling flatland. His city dwellers do find light along the way – achingly, bracingly, sometimes incidentally. Yet it is in the insistence of their paths that Pearce captures their resolute spirits while summoning the soul of their city.”
Bayo Ojikutu, author of 47th Street Black and Free Burning
“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. And in his own stylish manner, Pearce pulls off, again and again, dazzling plotlines that deeply satisfy. I loved reading this book.”
Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once