The El

Praise

“Chicago will never die. Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. won’t let it.”
—Stephen Graham Jones, bestselling author of The Only Good Indians

“[Van Alst] is so off-handedly smart, and cool and real as hell. He writes the city beautifully, the way it chokes and breathes out the lives of its people, in too many ways to track, on one of its trains say, crowded and loud. Van Alst writes exactly like himself, a true original, writing about Native people in Chicago, about Native people involved with gangs, and with relationships to the city. He writes about the internal lives of what we have to call criminals, but that term itself is a misunderstanding in a stolen country, where laws made to benefit its thieves only make sense justice-wise in the same way that America called itself the land of the free even while it was led by leaders who owned slaves. Everything he writes is beautifully wrought, mean and bright, and surprisingly tender.”
—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There There

“A lyrical and magical ride on Chicago’s El, in the golden era of tribal, mutli-racial gangbanging. Rooted in the day that established the origins of our city’s decades-long civil war that still rages on. Theodore Van Alst is the storyteller Chicago’s been needing for a long long time.”
—Bill Hillmann, author of The Old Neighborhood

“Chicago is built on stolen land, but its writers remain free to build their own cities of words, to reclaim their collective past and assert their individual present. In The El, [however your long-ass name will be used in this sort of copy!] constructs a new edifice for Chicago’s collective textual city. No obscure gang-banger graffiti tag symbolically claiming territory the powerful think they own, his contemporary indigenous, working-class, and poetic voice develops a whole new neighborhood. Read The El, and you will understand the El, and Chicago, from a vital new perspective.”
—Bill Savage, editor of Chicago by Day and Night