Chicago Tales

By Bill VanPatten

E. M. Forster once described Chicago as A fa??ade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the fa??ade, every type of dubiousness. In Chicago Talesa collection of fourteen short storiesfirst-time fiction author Bill VanPatten takes us behind the fa??ade as he crafts a rich mosaic of characters caught in events ranging from the everyday to the extra-ordinary. On these pages we encounter a transvestite prostitute trapped in an abusive relationship, a Latina confronting her agnosticism when the Virgin Mary appears under an expressway (as she did in April 2005), an adolescent Irish girl whoin 1871 anti-immigrant Chicagodiscovers a terrible truth about her mother, a 1930s marriage of convenience that results in a husband-and-wife hit team, and a vodka-swigging atheist thrust into the company of a Bible-toting college student when they find themselves the last two persons alive in Chicago. VanPatten serves up these remarkable people and more, challenging the reader to not have sympathy, to not find some part of the characters conflicted lives with which to identify. In the end, Chicago Tales may be more about the universality of the human condition, set in the context of the city that British historian James Bryce described as Perhaps the most typically American place in America. Indeed, the characters inhabiting the pages of this book could exist just about anywhere. But they happen to live in Chicagodubiousness and all.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1432706314
• ISBN13: 9781432706319
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Outskirts Pr
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.0"