Stateway's Garden: Stories, Hardcover

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 hotbed 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.

Stateway's Garden is a coming of age narrative 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, Jasmon Drain reveals a vibrant community that creates its own ecosystem, all set in a series of massive, seemingly soulless concrete buildings. 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."

Drawing on his own childhood and adolescence in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, Jasmon Drain does not shy away from showing the darkness, terror, and misery of life for his characters, but instead renders the full complexity of their human experiences. Exquisitely detailed and novelistic in scope, this collection will linger in your mind long after you have turned the final page.

Jasmon Drain is a 2010 and 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. He grew up in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, and currently resides in the Kenwood neighborhood.