Description
“It’s not down on any map; true places never are.” —Herman Melville
Using the city of Chicago as a point of departure, we’ll look at the myriad ways certain great Chicago writers—Bellow, Forrest, Cicernos, Howland, and Dybek—use select detail to give us their version of a fictional Chicago. We’ll also branch out to other cities and writers, including Dublin (Joyce), London (Dickens), St. Petersburg (Gogol), New York (Malamud), Lagos (Abani), to see how these writers capture their own cities with varying degrees of detail—all with an eye toward how we can make our own cities (as well as towns and villages and rural areas) come alive on the page.
