Praise for The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories — Nov. 2025

“This is a terrific collection. I savored it, one story at a time, the way I do the masters of the genre—Trevor or Munro or Gallant. Like them, Pearce creates in each short story a novel’s worth of rich characterization with deft artistic compression; and like the masters of geographically linked collections—Joyce, Anderson—Pearce renders contemporary Chicago in loving and brutal complexity from a myriad of vivid voices.  And in his own stylish manner, Pearce pulls off, again and again, dazzling plotlines that deeply satisfy. I loved reading this book.”

—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once

“The power of Pearce’s book rises from the foundational sense of Chicago as a city of neighborhoods. Neighborhood is the level where the great urban themes­—race, ethnicity, minority culture, assimilation, inequality, democracy, the American Dream—that elevate the work of writers like Algren, Brooks, Bellow, Terkel, Cisneros, and Kotlowitz have been expressed, a lineage to which this book belongs.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, Paper Lantern: Love Stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories