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364 pages
ISBN: 978-09709198-9-2
Weight: 14.9 ounces
Nine stories about a Serbian immigrant steelworking community in South Chicago that span a generation, from the 1950s to the 1980s when the steel industry collapsed. The stories are written in English, Serbian, French, and Latin, which mimic the blind spots an the ordinary reader encounters in a multilingual environment; however, the reader's not-knowing plays an integral part in the narration. Beneath the veneer of linguistic realism, different streams of history, represented by 600 etymologically related words across the four languages, collide and animate the inner lives of the characters. A traumatized child, a high school dropout, an abused immigrant housewife, a college student who flees to Paris, a work-hard play-hard young attorney, an out-of-work shop steward angling for a precinct captain's job, and others relate the life and death of the neighborhood in an ever-expanding spiral of implication and moral responsibility. Multilingual fictional, at least in Chicago, may take different forms: English, Polish, German, and Greek; English, Spanish, Italian, and Russian; English, Chinese, Yiddish, and Hindi; etc. Other parts of the country would yield different combinations; yet the dynamic would remain the same. Steel City, Heavenly Kingdom is unmatched in contemporary fiction for innovation and boldness of conception. Each story dares to take a death-defying leap into the multilingual world, and it returns with a vision of America that we have never seen before — uncompromising, maddening, enigmatic, and enlightening.
364 pages
ISBN: 978-09709198-9-2
Weight: 14.9 ounces
Nine stories about a Serbian immigrant steelworking community in South Chicago that span a generation, from the 1950s to the 1980s when the steel industry collapsed. The stories are written in English, Serbian, French, and Latin, which mimic the blind spots an the ordinary reader encounters in a multilingual environment; however, the reader's not-knowing plays an integral part in the narration. Beneath the veneer of linguistic realism, different streams of history, represented by 600 etymologically related words across the four languages, collide and animate the inner lives of the characters. A traumatized child, a high school dropout, an abused immigrant housewife, a college student who flees to Paris, a work-hard play-hard young attorney, an out-of-work shop steward angling for a precinct captain's job, and others relate the life and death of the neighborhood in an ever-expanding spiral of implication and moral responsibility. Multilingual fictional, at least in Chicago, may take different forms: English, Polish, German, and Greek; English, Spanish, Italian, and Russian; English, Chinese, Yiddish, and Hindi; etc. Other parts of the country would yield different combinations; yet the dynamic would remain the same. Steel City, Heavenly Kingdom is unmatched in contemporary fiction for innovation and boldness of conception. Each story dares to take a death-defying leap into the multilingual world, and it returns with a vision of America that we have never seen before — uncompromising, maddening, enigmatic, and enlightening.