| Jun ’05 |
| 18 |
| 12:00 am |
Dive Friday withJonathan Stockton and Kirby GannFriday, June 17th, 7:00 PMFREE
Ig Publishing presents Dive Friday, featuring Jonathan Stockton, reading from his seminal study of Chicago’s seedy underworld, Chicago’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Windy City, and Kirby Gann, reading from his newly released novel, Our Napoleon in Rags, most of which is set in a dive bar.
Our Napoleon in Rags centers around Haycraft Keebler, bipolar son of a famous politician, who thinks he canchange the world. And he will do anything, legal or otherwise, to inspire the people of Montreux, a decaying city in the heartland of America, to rise up against the powers that be and restore the city to its former glory. Haycraft’s home away from home is the Don Quixote, a dive bar in the heart of the heart of the city, and the regulars, long used to Haycraft’s schemes, keep watch over their bipolar “Napoleon in Rags.” However, the bonds that hold this “family” together are forever changed when Haycraft falls in love with a fifteen-year old male hustler. Weaving the contemporary hot button issues of mental illness, homophobia, racism and police brutality through a novel that is Victorian in its graceful storytelling,
Chicago?s Best Dive Bars features opinionated reviews of over 90 of the grungiest and grittiest drinking establishments in the Windy City. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those ?other? bar guides and find out where the ?real? people do their drinking, then Chicago?s Best Dive Bars, is the drinking person?s guide to the delightfully filthy underside of Chicago bar life.
Kirby Gann’s short fiction has appeared in Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review. He is also Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the MFA Program at Spalding University. And, he went to college in Chicago.
Jonathan Stockton is freelance writer, proofreader and Leap Year Baby. He lives, works and recovers the next day in Chicago.
