Hometown and host to talents as diverse as Richard Wright, David Mamet, Maya Angelou, Saul Bellow, and Mike Royko, Chicago boasts a rich tradition of writers who have helped shape our sense of the city even as the city informs their best work. It's "a writer's town . . . a fighter's town," according to Nelson Algren, and this anthology proves it. With a striking new cover, Chicago Stories collects the most evocative writing on the city, its gritty realism, and indomitable spirit.

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood.

This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb – once considered the "crime of the century" – to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption.

Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, “the most significant Jewish writer of his times.”

Walk into Happy Joe's in Bettendorf, Iowa, for their lunch buffet, and chances are good that you might find me there, sitting down at my favorite round table, enjoying a slice of the taco pizza I created and made famous. I will sit there for hours, talking to customers, telling jokes, and waiting for children to come by. Any child passing me will be rewarded with a wooden nickel, good for a scoop of ice cream or bowl of frozen 'Joegurt,' and that child will walk away standing a little taller, a little more confident in himself, and know, without a doubt, that they are a pretty special kid.

A hard-hitting study of how ambition and greed are leading our cities to disaster.

Before there was a Ground Zero in New York City, Block 37 was a giant hole in the heart of a great American city. In 1990, Chicago's Block 37 (as a key part of a twenty-seven-acre urban renewal project) was razed to the ground. After the expenditure of nearly $250 million of public and private capital, nothing has been built on this once vital and densely-occupied city block. This stubborn vacancy at the center of Chicago's historic downtown eerily presaged the post 9/11 wasteland in Lower Manhattan.

In a new critical introduction, Ross Miller makes the historical and political connections necessary to understand how modern city planning and redevelopment really works. By exploring one American urban block in meticulous detail, Miller clarifies the opaque process that continually breaks and remakes our most vital cities. Here's the Deal is a thrilling true-life story of back room deals and political promises. Told throughout with the scrupulousness of serious scholarship and the excitement of a novel, Here's the Deal is already considered a modern classic of urban literature.

Book by Watson, Daryl

"Magnificent…the best work of economic and business history I've ever read." ―Paul Krugman

In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.

"It does not belong on a shelf but in the hands of community activists, politicians, reporters and campaign workers who want to get a better understanding of ward politics in Chicago." ―Lawndale News-West Side Times

"... enough lively tidbits in a breezily written way to keep any Chicago City Council political junkie awake." ―Pioneer Press

"... in Chicago Politics Ward by Ward, the system reveals the bizarre adaptations usually associated with life on a coral reef. If you can’t believe these guys really exist, look again." ―Chicago Magazine

"All told, a most useful and entertaining book." ―Crain’s Chicago Business,p>

"... a good, handy reference for those who need to know a bit about any particular city ward―and good fodder for Chicago’s legions of political junkies." ―Chicago Enterprise

"Important demographic information and fascinating histories make it an interesting and often hilarious tour." ―Near North News

"... an energetic and ambitious book." ―Illinois Issues

Crammed with information but written in a style as lively as the city it describes, this book is the most comprehensive guide ever written about Chicago politics and the unique characters who have given special flavor to each ward.

Combining nostalgia and historical detail, David Young tells the colorful story of transportation in Chicago, from the plank roads of the 1850s to the streetcar straphangers of the 1920s to the articulated buses of the 1990s. Illustrated with more than 90 photographs and maps, Chicago Transit reveals the political shenanigans, business deals, and technological changes behind the transportation system that made Chicago "the city that works."

Since 1850, Chicago has felt the benefits of a vital Italian presence. These immigrants formed much of the unskilled workforce employed to build up this and many other major U.S. cities. From often meager and humble beginnings, Italians built and congregated in neighborhoods that came to define the Chicago landscape. Post-World War II development threatened this communal lifestyle, and subsequent generations of Italian Americans have been forced to face new challenges to retain their ethnic heritage and identity in a changing world. With the city's support, they are succeeding.

Between 1850 and 1870, New Orleans boasted the largest Italian-born population of any city in the United States. Its early Italian immigrants included musicians, business leaders, and diplomats. Sadly, in 1891, 11 members of the large Sicilian settlement in New Orleans were victims of the largest mass lynching in American history. However, by 1910, the city’s French Quarter was a “Little Palermo” with Italian entrepreneur, laborers, and restauranteurs dominating the scene.

It's easy to get caught up in the hidden history of Ravenswood and Lake View, like the Harm's Park picnic that lasted fifty-four years or the political gimmickry of the Cowboy Mayor" of Chicago. Who can resist a double take over folk like the "Father of Ravenswood," who kept Chicago from falling to the Confederacy, or the "North Side's Benedict Arnold," who was sent to the electric chair during World War II? If you want to visit the days when the Cubs were the Spuds or debate whether Ravenswood is an actual neighborhood or just a state of mind, do it with longtime North Side journalist Patrick Butler in this curio shop of forgotten people and places."

The unrelenting industrialization of America in the 19th century brought undreamed-of wealth and abundance to the nation as it emerged as a major world power after the trauma of a bloody civil war; however, the wealth was unevenly distributed, and industrialization inevitably produced the undesirable side effects of overcrowded tenement life, pollution, and the general degradation of the environment. This, in turn, set some of the nation's great thinkers on the path to coming up with answers to alleviate the ill effects of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society. Frederick Law Olmsted's answer in 1868 was the conception of a suburb for Chicago that combined the best aspects of urban life with that of rural life. So, he created Riverside, an ideal environment for civilization to flourish.

Chicago’s Near West Side was and is the city’s most famous Italian enclave, earning it the title of “Little Italy.” Italian immigrants came to Chicago as early as the 1850s, before the massive waves of immigration from 1874 to 1920. They settled in small pockets throughout the city, but ultimately the heaviest concentration was on or near Taylor Street, the main street of Chicago’s Little Italy. At one point a third of all Chicago’s Italian immigrants lived in the neighborhood. Some of their descendents remain, and although many have moved to the suburbs, their familial and emotional ties to the neighborhood cannot be broken. Taylor Street: Chicago’s Little Italy is a pictorial history from the late 19th century and early 20th century, from when Jane Addams and Mother Cabrini guided the Italians on the road to Americanization, through the area’s vibrant decades, and to its sad story of urban renewal in the 1960s and its rebirth 25 years later.

Every summer from 1904 to 1967, for 63 years, Riverview―the world’s largest amusement park―opened its gates to millions of people from all walks of life. For three generations, the Schmidt’s family park offered rides, shows, food, and music to men, women, and especially children. Riverview survived depressions, two World Wars, labor disputes, Prohibition, and a World’s Fair that threatened to take a great deal of its business. Riverview Amusement Park tells the story of Riverview’s growth from 22 acres and three rides to 140 acres and more than 100 attractions. Through an extensive collection of never-before published images, author Dolores Haugh chronicles the tale of this impressive chapter of Chicago history. Known as the “Roller Coaster Capital of America,” Riverview remained a Chicago landmark until it was unexpectedly closed in 1967.