Stateway's Garden

A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago "The residents and their buoyant dreams are documented, celebrated, honored. I bow to this writer in gratitude."—Sandra CisnerosBefore being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago's South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking readers up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects—a set of buildings similar in design to Stateway Gardens to the south—this collection gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures, and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them. Through Jasmon Drain's sensitive and often...