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A remarkably assured and accomplished debut
novel that weaves a diverse narrative web encompassing the
bursting life of contemporary Chicago. Looped tells
the separate stories of a diverse group of Chicagoans—black,
brown, and white, gay, straight, and bi—as their lives
unfold in diverging and (occasionally) converging ways over
the course of the year 2000. The narrative is spun out of
short episodes that progress week by week, each brief chapter
detailing a day, an event, or a moment in the lives of an
given set of the novel’s primary characters. Among these
are the family of a middle-class black postman whose runaway
daughter has just learned she’s pregnant; a gifted half-Vietnamese
high-schooler whose troubled father spies on the son he abandoned
years earlier; a tradition-bound Greek diner owner whose upwardly
mobile daughter, embarrassed by her ethnic roots, is snarled
in a loveless marriage; a gay chef whose shaky relationship
is strained by the visit of his closeted lover’s uncle,
a Catholic priest; and the motley members of Lather Rinse
Repeat, an up-and-coming band shaken by the breakup of its
ambitious lead guitarist and his sexually confused songwriter
girlfriend. Ambitious, sprawling, engrossing, multifaceted,
insightful, and addictively readable, Looped explodes
with a life and vitality that mirrors the multicultural reality
of twenty-first century Chicago, where the families that sustain
us are more likely to be those we’ve created than those
we’re born to.
Andrew Winston was born
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and now
lives in Chicago. He is past editor-in-chief and fiction editor
of Chicago Review. This is his first novel.
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