A Mensch at Work

by Rosellen Brown

It isn’t easy to make a mark in the world by being a good guy, a friend, an acute observer more kind than critical. Those qualities don’t sound dramatic enough to constitute a career but Alex K, soft-spoken and content to stay out of the limelight, has brought us a number of remarkable portraits made accessible by the way he watches, listens, sympathizes without sentimentality and then synthesizes what he’s seen and heard into clean, vital prose. Needless to say, There Are No Children Here bears extraordinary witness to fortitude in the face of violence and blight. But one of my favorite of Alex’s books is the modest, companionable Never a City So Real, an invitation to admire a community of souls simply going about their business as the city presses in on them. A man who, without vanity, has a reverence for the ordinary, Alex knows how to call attention to subjects whose stories might never otherwise be told. No wonder we cherish him.

Rosellen Brown, an acclaimed author of stories, essays, novels, and poems, received the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s Fuller Award in 2016.