North and Central

Andy's a bartender in North Austin in the late 1970s. For years, he's been slinging beers to corrupt cops and fat Zenith employees, but given the neighborhood's ongoing decline (and his own serious health issues), he's starting to wonder how long it can go on. He's serving workers from a dying factory in a dying neighborhood; he sees crime on the rise--and he decides to become a criminal himself. North and Central perfectly evokes Chicago in the epic winter of '78-'79--the bleak season of blizzards and disco and John Wayne Gacy--capturing the city in microcosm through the denizens of one blue-collar watering hole. If Springsteen and Bukowski had teamed up to write a story about a Chicago bar, they'd have been hard pressed to do better than this; it's an anti-Cheers, a bittersweet story about a place where everybody knows your nickname, and they're tired of you coming around because you're a degenerate. But it's more than just a static portrait; it's a gripping and moving story destined to earn its own place among the classics of Chicago literature.

Author: Bob Hartley
Publisher: Tortoise Books
Published: 04/08/2017
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.55d
ISBN: 9780986092282

About the Author
Hartley, Bob: - Bob Hartley was raised on the West Side of Chicago. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. His first novel, Following Tommy, was published in 2012 by Cervena Barva Press to extremely favorable reviews. He has been, among other things, a writer, actor, singer, teacher, bartender, mailroom clerk, and washer of soap molds. He currently makes his living as a respiratory therapist and lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and two children.