CHIRBy Awards Recognize Some of Chicago’s Best Books and Authors

by Michael Antman

“Chicago lives in and on my body in ways I'll never be able to explain, no matter how many words I learn, how many dictionaries and encyclopedias I read. And I'm good with that. To belong to a place that belongs to you, that claims you eternally and always has, what more could you ask for?” — Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., The El. 

The El, by Chicago novelist Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. (Vintage, August 2025), winner of the Chicago Review of Books' 2025 CHIRBy Fiction Award, is one of the “Chicagoest” books I have ever read. Van Alst Jr., an enrolled member of the Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians, has recreated a highly specific slice of Chicago life in 1979 that is so vividly depicted that you can practically hear the metallic screeching of the Ravenswood trains as they round a bend of tracks, and almost taste the celery salt and fennel in the cheap street food — Chicago-style hot dogs and Italian sausage sandwiches, respectively — that only native Chicagoans get to enjoy.  It’s the kind of novel for readers who enjoy Kerouac, Bukowski, Algren and other chroniclers of the grittier side of life, and like reading about characters who are “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

The winner of the CHIRBy non-fiction award was Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing. The poetry award was given to Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate.  And the award for essay or short story was given to the article and radio story "A trans migrant came to Chicago to escape violence. Now she’s afraid of deportation” by Adriana Cardona-Maguigad in WBEZ Chicago. 

This year’s ceremony marked the 10th anniversary of the CHIRBys. The awards were presented at a lively, packed-to-the-rafters event, co-presented by the bookstore Exile in Bookville and by the Stories Matter Foundation, the parent organization of the Chicago Review of Books, in Curtiss Hall, located in one of Chicago’s most fascinating and historic public spaces, The Fine Arts Building. It is the last public building in Chicago with manually operated elevators (the kind with cage-like pantograph folding doors) but if you choose to take the staircase instead, you’ll pass through multiple floors of art studios, music shops, the Exile in Bookville bookstore, and several violin repair shops. If you climb the stairs at the right time of day, you might be lucky enough to hear someone practicing an aria or Bach violin solo. It’s a part of Chicago’s venerable cultural past that is still very much alive. (Readers interested in learning more about the building and its history are encouraged to purchase Keir Graff’s book on the subject, mentioned at the conclusion of this article.)

A trip to the past is just what The El provides, albeit of a less elevated sort. Van Elst’s novel is a day-in-the-life story of a multi-ethnic group of “Simon City Royal” gang members who traverse the city one long-ago summer day, north to south to north again via the El (Chicago’s elevated train system) to meet up with a loose alliance of other gangs, and end up battling fellow gang members and enemy gangs along the way. They also must constantly dodge the Chicago police, described by the main character, the part-Indian “half-breed go-between” Teddy, as “the worst gang to have to go up against.  They’re a bunch of immoral fucks with better equipment than us.”

The train journey involves many stops, including some very violent ones.  Teddy seals a knife wound with a tube of Crazy Glue he carries around for that purpose; another gang member, tossed onto the third rail, is far beyond any such conveniences.  

The novel, which is clearly inspired by and loosely based on, though far more realistic than, the cult classic movie The Warriors — as well as by, evidently, Van Alst’s own long-ago experiences — is deliberately multifarious and sensorially overwhelming. Those omnipresent El train rumbles and shrieks? Van Alst places them where they belong, not along the lakefront or among the glossy condos, but in the neighborhoods with the low-rent apartment buildings that butt up so close to the tracks you could reach out of a window with a fly swatter and almost touch a passing train: “Steel on steel from train cars at the Howard Street hub screeched through the bottom of the open wire-laced safety window propped up with a stubby clay flowerpot full of dead cigarette butts and an even deader cactus.”  

The bewildering variety and shifting alliances of the various gangs themselves — Simon City Royals, Insane Unknowns, Imperial Gangsters, Latin Eagles, Vice Lords, Gaylords, Mexican Playboys, Assyrian Eagles, Cicero Insane, Black Gangster Disciples, and so on — will evoke for many the enormous, colorful and threatening-looking “tags” (graffiti) that were commonly seen on buildings, bridges and overpasses back in the day, and are still visible to a lesser extent today. For non-gang members and ordinary working-class Chicagoans, the names and symbols (dozens of which are represented typographically with tiny printer’s dingbats throughout the book) provide a glimpse into an unknown and unknowable parallel world to their regular workaday existences.  

Even the handshakes these characters exchange belong to a different and complicated culture: “We shook hands, Royal-style; soul, then crossed forefingers like guns, hooked those, and twisted them up to pitchforks by adding middle fingers and thumbs, then dropped the middle, touched pinkies, flicked our wrists, threw down the crown.”

As one character muses to himself, “for real, this is the craziest anthropology class you can ever take.”

This paths traveled by the gang members are not only parallel to, but almost entirely hidden from, ordinary Chicago citizens.  In between trains, the Royals walk “greasy dirt and decayed blacktop alley(s),” railroad sidings, and “cinder paths…made up of flint and lava rock chips, hedged in on all sides by dense vines and brambles…a deep patch of nature full of trees and vines and tall grass about thirty hilly yards wide on either side of three sets of elevated rails.”  This is a path that the physician’s assistants, accountants and money managers speeding by on the nearby roads, or on the commuter trains or the El itself, don’t even know exist, much less travel upon.

The Chicago of The El isn’t, in short, the city of Lettuce Entertain You restaurants, classic architecture and the Art Institute; it is the Chicago of Albany Park and Hegewisch and other neglected neighborhoods, of alleys and gangways, and of “Jewel’s” and “jagoffs” and “frunch rooms” (living rooms) and similar stray fragments of Chicago slang and patois.  

It isn’t only the physical paths but the life paths that are wildly divergent in this novel. Many of the characters in The El think about, or face up to, early and violent deaths.  But at the same time, they find the gang life fulfilling and even thrilling — a family — and they exhibit heavy contempt for the suckers who work for a living. Teddy, for example, upon observing a “petty businessman (who) shuffled papers from a cheap briefcase” muses, “His boss didn't know who he was and cared even less about his ideas. He'll pick up a Hungry-Man fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn TV dinner from the Jewel's on his way home, watch Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, then pass out in his recliner. At 11 p.m. he'll roll out of the BarcaLounger, take a shower, get in his unmade bed, and dream about splitting his boss's head open with the office fire extinguisher.” Later, Teddy speaks of “Big Ten state school assholes who were gentrifying the neighborhoods farther north. They looked sweaty as fuck in their cheapish suits and power blouses with running shoes, uncomfortable in their own pale skins, lives of lame office hookups and hopes for big suburban houses already carved deep in their sad, doughy faces…”

And yet Teddy himself joins the Navy and after his discharge gets positions at those twin bastions of unrestrained capitalism, The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. There aren’t a lot of elderly gang members in real life or in this book; either you die, “spend solid time in Joliet,” or move on with your life, as Teddy does.  

One of the most interesting aspects of this thoroughly engaging book is its kaleidoscopic narrative structure, featuring alternating first-person narration from more than a dozen different gang members, as well as “CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) Supervisor 2134” and “CPD (Chicago Police Department) Officer 1705.”  The story is rarely difficult to follow, however (even if the gang allegiances and handshakes are) because there is no Rashomon-like trickery, nor unreliable-narrator contrivances, and the principal voice — and the only one in the past tense — is that of Teddy, who leads his crew into battle and dominates the narrative. 

The final CHIRBy award of the evening, The Adam Morgan Literary Leadership Award, is named in honor of the founding editor of the Chicago Review of Books. This year’s award was given to Samira Ahmed, National Leader of Authors Against Book Bans, and a poet, short story writer and author of novels for young people. (And also, coincidentally, the author of a YA novel titled Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know.) In her justly well-received acceptance speech, Ahmed noted, quite correctly, that “it’s been a really tough year for democracy,” and that, in the face of book bans and other forms of free-speech restrictions, we must remember that “the freedom to think is one of the most fundamental human rights.”  She declared, “we are going to defeat these fascists.” The literary community, its own sort of “last bastion” against apathy, ignorance and misrule, must maintain constant vigilance against both the overt banning of books and the covert suppression of unpopular ideas, and it was gratifying to see this issue addressed at the ceremony. 

The other finalists in the CHIRBy fiction category were: All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall; The Favorites by Layne Fargo; True Failure by Alex Higley; and Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo.

The poetry finalists were Death is a Mariachi by Marcy Rae Henry; Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen; The Book of Echoes by David Gregory Welch; and Games for Children by Keith S. Wilson.

The other finalists in the non-fiction category were The Mourner’s Bestiary by Eiren Caffall; Chicago’s Fine Arts Building:Music, Magic, and Murder by Keir Graff;  Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit by Josh Noel; and The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman.

And the short story or essay finalists were “‘There are no places for us to just be free’” by Tonia Hill in The TRiiBE; “Lives in Transition: Transgender Young Adults Search for Stability in Uncertain Times” by Mare Ralph in South Side Weekly and City Bureau;“Doors Closing” by Tal Rosenberg in Chicago Magazine; and “Dennis Rodman’s gay 90s” by Jack M Silverstein in Chicago Reader.

Michael Antman is the author of the novels Cherry Whip and Everything Solid Has a Shadow. He is a longtime book and theatre critic and was a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing.