• Sue Kwong

This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout. The results of each contest will be published every Monday, along with an essay by each judge explaining his or her choice. The Reader reader who best predicts the judges’ rulings will win a trip to Mexico.

Both authors have been part of my formative reading too: one of Dybek’s early stories, “Blight,” was one of the first short stories I admired after I discovered it in my parents’ copy of Chicago magazine in 1985; then in college in the 90s, I read and loved The House on Mango Street. So I began my reading with the sense of a clear kinship between these two books: two neighborhoods in the same city.

It’s easy to conclude, as many have, that Mango Street is strongest as a universal narrative about inner-city life. Seeing it as a Chicago book, though, casts it in a bolder light. What does it mean to live here? it asks. Do the girls and women of Mango Street inhabit Chicago any less than the people—especially the boys and men—in Dybek’s stories, or in The Adventures of Augie March, for that matter? For Perry Katzek, having the freedom to roam the city is one of his few privileges, but it’s a privilege nonetheless. Reading Magellan at the same time as Mango Street, I began to consider how most of Perry’s rite-of-passage childhood encounters with the city happen in the company of his dad and uncle; how his mother, “Moms,” silent and rarely mentioned, stays home; how the only way a girl gets to see the fire-truck graveyard and other wondrous, gritty sights is when a guy like Perry takes her to see them. I don’t mean to call these things out as faults on Dybek’s part, or as weaknesses in I Sailed With Magellan, because of course they aren’t. But it’s because of Mango Street, and to Cisneros’s credit, that I came to notice these absences.