This winter, a flurry of 5 new Chicago writers and their fiction debuts

CHICAGO - This month, next month - and probably long into the future - if you pay any attention at all to the Chicago literary landscape, you're going to need to acquaint yourself with a handful of fresh names. No fewer than five debut novels by Chicago authors arrive on shelves this winter, an unusually strong showing. All are talented fiction writers and all have landed healthy deals with major publishers. They tell tales from the Stateway Gardens housing projects, and about women linked mysteriously across centuries. They write about a forgotten science-fiction novelist, and about growing up in South Shore, and about the toxic history between a mother and daughter.

Some have left Chicago, some still live here.

But more important, not one of their books reads like the beginning of a minor career.

Consider this an introduction.

Jasmon Drain, 'Stateway's Garden'

Vitals: 44, grew up in Englewood, now lives in Kenwood.

It's about: The interlocking trajectories of a handful of tenants in the now-demolished State Street housing project. Set in the 1980s, and ending with Stateway's demolition in 2007, reminiscent of story collections from Raymond Carver and Gloria Naylor, this elegant first book begins with a shy child named Tracy, spirals outward to his distracted mother, then gravitates towards an older brother, then their neighbors; by the final story, we're reading a furious history of an enormous slab of concrete ("a grayish-white color that looked like dirty sheets bleached repeatedly") that shared a single quality with the millionaire homes on Lake Shore Drive, "condo views of the city" -