Published in: November-December 2014 issue.
Lincoln Avenue: Chicago Stories
by Gregg Shapiro
Squares & Rebels. 100 pages, $14.95
Last Night at the Blue Angel
by Rebecca Rotert
William Morrow. 334 pages, $25.99
WHEN I WAS growing up in Evanston, Illinois, Chicago’s Lincoln Avenue intrigued me because it was one of those streets off the actual grid. It coursed through the city at an odd diagonal and confused me, though I often drove my mother’s Pontiac Le Mans along it, especially on a Friday or Saturday night. Some of the characters in Gregg Shapiro’s new collection of short stories, Lincoln Avenue, seem to favor AMC Hornets and Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagons for their forays.