Stateway's Garden

Stories

By: Jasmon Drain

Narrated by: Guy Lockard, Shayna Small, Sullivan Jones

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

"The residents and their buoyant dreams are documented, celebrated, honored. I bow to this writer in gratitude." (Sandra Cisneros)

Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Chicago Tribune

Before being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking listeners up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects - a set of buildings similar in design to Stateway Gardens to the south - this collection gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures, and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them. Through Jasmon Drain’s sensitive and often playful prose, we see another side of what we have come to know as "the projects".

Stateway’s Garden is a coming-of-age story told in short stories, through the lens of a childhood made rough by the crush of poverty and violence, with the crack epidemic a looming specter ahead. And yet, through the experiences and ambitions of Tracy and other young characters, Drain reveals a vibrant community that creates its own ecosystem, all set in a series of massive, seemingly soulless concrete buildings. Not shying away from the darkness of life for his characters, Drain shows the full complexity of their human experiences.

Exquisitely detailed and novelistic in scope, this collection of stories will linger in your mind long after you have heard the final word.

©2020 Jasmon Drain (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“About Chicago, Jasmon Drain knows a thing or two. He writes about a housing project so grim that those who move in dream of leaving. Stateway’s Garden as a community is long gone, destroyed by gentrification. But the residents and their buoyant dreams are documented, celebrated, honored. I bow to this writer in gratitude.” (Sandra Cisneros, author of Caramelo)

“The only fireworks in Jasmon Drain’s subtly rendered, beautiful debut are the ones his young characters watch explode in the distance from the public housing project they live in. These are patient, profoundly compassionate stories about the small shocks and flickers of transcendence in ordinary Chicagoans’ lives. Told in hauntingly spare prose reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s, Drain’s stories take a moment to sink in. Once they do, they don’t leave you.” (Sam Graham-Felsen, author of Green)

“Characters seek soft shelter in these powerfully felt, interconnected stories.... Capturing an intricate portrait of Stateway Gardens (a real place that was razed in 2007), Drain mines the idea that life in the projects could be both a thing to escape and something to nurture, a matter made more critical by the ticking clock of gentrification.... A deep, vibrant collection.” (Booklist)

Timely and engrossing

As a Chicago native this book resonated strongly for me.
The upwelling of systemic racism associated with the Trump administration provides a vivid backdrop to these stories of bright, intelligent, capable young people relegated to obscurity because of a chemical in their epidermis.

Not what you would expect

Solid coming of age story that keeps you engage. The writer is colorful and can really bring you into the moments that impact the characters on a visceral level.