Mordant and fresh writing on the Windy City

BOOK OF THE DAY: Granta 108: Chicago. Granta Publications. pp288 £10.99

CHICAGO’S RECENT bid for the Olympics vanished quicker than the time it takes Usain Bolt to flash past the finish line. As Tom Humphries memorably wrote in this paper: the girl from Ipanema got the nod ahead of the boy from Hawaii. The boy from Hawaii, of course, being Chicago’s most famous recent resident, Barack Obama.

Chicago is the subject of the periodical Granta's current issue. Four times a year Granta Publications brings out excellent anthologies of essays, articles, stories and photo essays in a book-length format. The slightly esoteric choice of theme for this issue is the American city of Chicago, which the publishers describe as "a city emerging as a microcosm of America".

So if you have never been to Chicago, as I have not, what do you learn about the city from issue No 108? Possibly that politics is the infrastructure that supports every city, and that emigration is the one that underpins it. The issue's most engaging piece, "Driving With Ed McIlroy" is by Chicago Tribunecolumnist Neil Steinberg. He writes about McIlroy, an 83-year-old man who believes politics is the glue that connects a community, a man who knows every politician, where every body is buried, and is five steps ahead of everyone else – on the evidence of this piece, one of Chicago's great characters.

Community is also the theme of Sarajevo-born fiction writer Alexsandar Hermon, who has lived in Chicago since 1992. His piece of memoir is about joining a football team shortly after his arrival in the city: a team that was made up of emigrants like himself, and how this weekly temporary community provided all of them with the security of belonging somewhere, when they were nobody in a huge city.

Second generation Ethiopian Dinaw Mengestu writes in “Big Money” about the strangeness of briefly returning to the place he was born – Chicago – from the city he now lives in, New York. His emigrant father, who runs a dispatch business, is ill and the aspirant writer son, used to hanging out in cool bars in New York, temporarily steps in to take over the business he always considered to be suffocating. By exploring again the city he took for granted growing up, he comes to a powerful understanding of the way a place forms a family and becomes part of its DNA.

Camilo José Vergara writes a thought-provoking piece to accompany his absorbing photo essay on the city’s housing projects, which he has documented over decades. Turn the pages and see portions of the city appear and disappear, projects replaced by skyscrapers, and wonder bleakly what happened in the process to all the people who lived in the now-vanished apartment blocks.

One of the residents of a similar project, Khalid, is the subject of Alex Kotlowitz’s narrative. Chicago, like most cities, has a violent, visceral section, where drugs and guns rule the streets and outsiders do not stray, even if they are residents of the same city. Khalid, the son of a Sudanese immigrant who sought the American dream of a better life in Chicago, was murdered by a man who befriended him as a child when he first arrived, and then got him into a gang. You read that piece, and then one by Wole Soyinka, the first African-American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: Soyinka’s subject is the first African-American US President. One city, two men, Khalid and Obama, two such different lives.

Rosita Boland is an Irish Timesjournalist. She is the author of A Secret Map of Ireland