ISBN: 0810127318 9780810127319

Category: Fiction / General

Page count: 272

Chicago is famously a "city of neighborhoods" that somehow balances metropolitan and parochial life. In the seventeen vividly rendered stories in <i>Ghosts of Chicago,</i> John McNally likewise captures the poignancy of both the shared experiences of a city and the interior details of his everyday characters.While McNally resurrects Chicago icons and institutions—including John Belushi, Walter Payton, and Richard J. Daley make appearances, and WGN’s "Creature Features" and a morning show for children featuring a silent goose are settings-- he is ultimately interested in the human condition, whether it’s railroad mogul George Pullman remembering his greatest triumph or the host of <i>Romper Room</i> experiencing her own awakening during the sexual revolution.Other stories tell of everyday people who must confront their own private ghosts—an accountant who falls in love with a woman who is in love with a man on death row; the son of a realtor who discovers his father’s secret life; a memoirist whose dark night of the soul leads him on a journey from which he may never return.McNally may be writing about Chicago—in the words of a <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i> reviewer, "He may have physically left Chicago, but the city has never left him"—but like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, the stories in this book transcend place.