A grassroots project at DePaul publishes Chicago stories — the books are free for the asking and you might even be in one
CHICAGO — Big Shoulders Books are free. You can request one. They’ll send you one. You might even be in one. Big Shoulders Books, founded at DePaul University a decade ago, has been one of the more quietly ambitious projects in Midwest journalism, though, in practice, the work is not written by professional journalists and its architects are faculty in the English department. The goal, however, is elementally journalistic: to gather an oral record of contemporary Chicago. Its violence, war veterans, romances. And now, with its latest history, “Virus City,” a street-level, everyday accounting of the pandemic.
Somewhere, Studs Terkel is smiling.
As with most of the books from Big Shoulders — and much of the work of Terkel, the godfather of quotidian conversation arranged as a widescreen mural of daily life — the narration comes almost entirely through a cross section of little-known Chicagoans, written in their words. As with Terkel, their anecdotes gather into the specificity,
