"Chicago's most famous stories tend to crowd out the competition and shout down alternate perspectives. Visit with the man who founded a 150-year-long Chicago political dynasty. Take a peek at some of the lesser-known Chicago film classics. Review Professor Moriarty's Chicago caper and Annie Oakley's cocaine case. Uncover the lengths to which Chicago's long celebrated Mr. Pioneer Settler went to keep a slave. Discover why the Kennedy curves at Division Street and why the county jail saved a gallows for fifty years. From Death Valley Scotty's wild ride to the bowling ball that went around the world, John Schmidt provides a parade of Chicago originals."--Provided by publisher.

Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Inspired by Preib’s daily life on the job, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself. The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges an unlikely connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten—or rendered invisible—by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, such as a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend or a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. As he encounters the real and imagined geographies of Chicago, the city reveals itself to be not just a backdrop, but a central force in his narrative of life and death. Preib’s accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, come alive in ways that readers will long remember.

Discover the history most Chicagoans don't know---the real Chicago Way. The Windy City is full of forgotten landmarks and unusual stories that rarely get the benefit of a guided tour. Meet the African-American congressman who paved the way for Harold Washington and Barack Obama, the South Side Jewish girl who became the president of a South American country, and the visiting Romanian queen who charmed the city. Learn when Chicagoans were paid to smile, how furniture sprouts on Windy City streets after a blizzard and why Smell-O-Vision seemed like a good idea. From an in-city ski resort to the nation's greatest train robbery, author John R. Schmidt offers a glimpse of the overlooked scenery of Chicago's past.

"The story of 999 is the story of Chicago at one of the most pivotal and explosive moments in its history. Set along the city's storied lakefront, 999 details the wealth, greed, power, corruption and even murder that accompanied the rise of arguably the most beautiful and historical residential building in Chicago. Lavishly illustrated and well researched, Fizdale's vivid account of a land grab so extensive that it was contested for more than five decades, sets the stage for the war for what would become Streeterville. He includes fascinating and largely unknown details of the lives of the boldfaced names of Chicago's past -- from the period just after the Chicago fire to the present."--Amazon.com.

Showcasing the first Ferris wheel, dazzling and unprece­dented electrification, and exhibits from around the world, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was Chicago’s chance to demonstrate that it had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and was about to take its place as one of the world’s great cities. Millions would flock to the fair, and many of them were looking for a good time before and after their visits to the Midway and the White City. But what was the bedazzled visitor to do in Chicago? Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America, a very unofficial guide to the world be­yond the fair, slaked the thirst of such curious folk. The plea­sures it details range from the respectable (theater, architec­ture, parks, churches and synagogues) to the illicit—drink, gambling, and sex. With a wink and a nod, the book decries vice while offering precise directions for the indulgence of any desire. In this newly annotated edition, Chicagoans Paul Durica and Bill Savage—who, if born earlier, might have written chapters in the original—provide colorful context and an informative introduction to a wildly entertaining journey through the Chicago of 120 years ago.

Part I. Hidden Landmarks: Central and West; The Cowpath in the Loop; Dillinger Wannabe; Walt Disney Birthplace; Hef 's Galewood Homestead; Carl Sandburg's First House; Sam Giancana Home; Continental Divide; The Palace on 12th Street; Anton J. Cermak Home; St. Paul Catholic Church; Marquette Monolith; Clarence Wagner's Bridge; The Balbo Column; Who Is Buried in Logan's Tomb?; Part II. Hidden Landmarks: North; Fairbank Row Houses; Cider House Story; Gloria Swanson's Many Chicago Homes; The Vice President from Evanston; The Leaning Tower of Niles; Hillary's Home; Bring 'Em Back Alive; Chicago's Oldest House?; Robinson Family Graves; The Ground 'L'; Chicago's Shortest Street; Red Emma's Hideout; The Nazi Saboteur on Fremont Street; The Tomb in the Park; Part III. Hidden Landmarks: South; Bet-a-Million; Joe Louis Home; The O'Leary Himself; The Senator and the Pineapple; Al Capone Home; Mahalia Jackson Home; Chicago's Oldest Public Monument; The Real "Christmas Story" House; The Enchanted Lake; Chicago's Smallest Cemetery; The Richest Black Man in America; Marxism on the Grand Boulevard; A Forgotten Home of Clarence Darrow; Daley Family Home; Part IV. Lost Landmarks; Ronald Reagan's Chicago Home; Edgewater Beach Hotel; The Original Old St. Mary's; Peter Hand Brewery; The Houses that Jimmy Built; The Wandering Monument; Henry W. Rincker House; The Gold Coast Caverns; Archer-35th Recreation; Western-Belmont Overpass; Part V. Drive-By Neighborhoods; Albany Park; Cicero; Englewood; Hegewisch; Mount Greenwood; Portage Park; Rogers Park; West Garfield Park.

Think you know Chicago? If you are thinking of Al Capone, the L, the Cubs, Barack Obama or the Great Fire of 1871, then you are remembering the highlights from the tour bus. Here's the rest of the story, day by day. Chicago opened the first blood bank, invented the vacuum cleaner and sent a bowling ball around the world. One high school football game drew 120,000 people. Chicagoans fought nineteen years over the name of a street. For fifty years, they saved a gallows for an escaped killer. And those are just some of the stories.

E. M. Forster once described Chicago as A fa?ºade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the fa?ºade, every type of dubiousness. In Chicago Talesa collection of fourteen short storiesfirst-time fiction author Bill VanPatten takes us behind the fa?ºade as he crafts a rich mosaic of characters caught in events ranging from the everyday to the extra-ordinary. On these pages we encounter a transvestite prostitute trapped in an abusive relationship, a Latina confronting her agnosticism when the Virgin Mary appears under an expressway (as she did in April 2005), an adolescent Irish girl whoin 1871 anti-immigrant Chicagodiscovers a terrible truth about her mother, a 1930s marriage of convenience that results in a husband-and-wife hit team, and a vodka-swigging atheist thrust into the company of a Bible-toting college student when they find themselves the last two persons alive in Chicago. VanPatten serves up these remarkable people and more, challenging the reader to not have sympathy, to not find some part of the characters conflicted lives with which to identify. In the end, Chicago Tales may be more about the universality of the human condition, set in the context of the city that British historian James Bryce described as Perhaps the most typically American place in America. Indeed, the characters inhabiting the pages of this book could exist just about anywhere. But they happen to live in Chicagodubiousness and all.

The antecedents of fantasy literature extend back to the very beginnings of storytelling itself, but modern fantasy became recognizable as a distinct literary form only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the publication of the novels of William Morris and the short stories of Lord Dunsany. The emphasis by these writers and their successors on ideal and sometimes less than ideal places and peoples who exist only in a realm of pure imagination laid the foundation for later works by J. R. R. Tolkien and many others. Book jacket.