Stateway's Garden — Jasmon Drain

A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

Before they were torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago's South Side were known as a hot-bed of poverty, drugs, gangs, 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--similar to the Stateway Gardens projects to the South of them--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 playful prose, we see another side of what we grew to know as "the projects."

Stateway's Garden is a coming of age story told in short stories, through the lens of a childhood made rough by the crush of poverty and violence, with the crack epidemic a looming specter ahead. And yet, through the experiences of Tracy and other young characters, Drain reveals a vibrant community that creates its own ecosystem, all set in a series of massive, seemingly soulless concrete buildings. Drain does not shy away from showing the darkness, terror, and misery of life for his characters, but rather the full complexity of their human experiences. Exquisitely detailed and novelistic in scope, this collection of stories will linger in your mind long after you have turned the final page.