Chi-Town - Hardcover

Blei, Norbert

3.4

15 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0944024106 ISBN 13: 9780944024102

Publisher: Ellis Pr, 1990

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The final work of the acclaimed Chicago Trilogy, this collection of nonfiction tales reveals Sandburg's ""city of the big shoulders,"" concrete and neon; uptown and downtown; State Street, Michigan Avenue; the river, the lake; the matter-of-factness and poetry of Chicago people - from Mike Royko describing his neighborhood to the observations of newspaper vendors, from Studs Terkel interviewing jazz great Dave Brubeck to dinner with Petros in Greek Town. Written with a keen eye, Blei's stories evoke a vanished Chicago, a city of gritty and colorful neighborhoods and their gritty and colorful characters. It is, as he writes, a ""love letter to a city that has meant so much to me.

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Review:

"Mr. Blei has a rare ability to describe internal emotions as if they were earth-shattering events.... Overall, these stories in a traditional mold, often containing subtle, experimental variations on language, present a refreshing alternative to much of the autobiographical fiction written today."

"One of the best writers in the Midwest."

"His is honest writing, spare, natural; the humor is dry; his appreciation of beauty, total."

"Wonderfully nostalgic pieces, partly autobiographical, partly historical, and partly fictional, representing a celebration of a special neighborhood associated with Chicago.... Blei has created and arrested here universal human characters who could inhabit any neighborhood of our memories and imaginations.... Highly recommended."

"These stories by Blei serve to confirm what good readers and reading writers have known for some long time: that the man is very, very good, a true son of the Middle West who descends from the brawny (and brainy) line of Sandburg and Hemingway...he is a grand story-teller."

"Blei has a rare ability to describe internal emotions as if they were earth-shattering events. . . . A refreshing alternative to much of the autobiographical fiction written today." --New York Times Book Review
"His is honest writing, spare, natural; the humor is dry; his appreciation of beauty, total." --Chicago magazine
"Blei's . . . powerful, uneven, brooding interest dwells two streets down from Nelson Algren, a block away from Harry Park Petrakis, and along the very busy line from Ernest Hemingway to Carl Sandburg, a few versts from Chekhov." --Arthur Shay, Chicago Sun-Times

About the Author:

Norbert Blei is a veteran of the famous City News Bureau of Chicago, winner of a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the author of seventeen books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and the editor/publisher of a small press dedicated to emerging and neglected writers, Cross+Roads Press. Among his many works are the two other books in his Chicago Trilogy, The Ghost of Sandburg's Phizzog (Ellis, 1987) and Neighborhood (Ellis, 1998), and a collection of poems, Paint Me a Picture/Make Me a Poem (Spoon River, 1987). Born and raised in Chicago, he now lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

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