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Painted Cities
To those outside it, Pilsen is a vast barrio on the south side of Chicago. To Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, it is a world of violence and decay and beauty, of nuance and pure chance. It is a place where the smell of cooking frijoles is washed away by that of dead fish in the river, where vendettas are a daily routine, and where a fourteen-year-old immigrant might hold the ability bring people back from the dead.
Simultaneously tough and tender, these stories mark the debut of a writer poised to represent his city's literature for decades to come.
Simultaneously tough and tender, these stories mark the debut of a writer poised to represent his city's literature for decades to come.
182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
11 people are currently reading
543 people want to read
About the author
Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski
3 booksAlexai Galaviz-Budziszewski grew up in the Pilsen neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. He has taught in the Chicago public school system and is currently a high school counselor for students with disabilities. In his spare time he builds and repairs motorcycles.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
March 13, 2014
Stegner said that a place without a poet isn't really a place.
If that's the case, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski just made Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood a place.
This book is a feat on par with Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes."
"Painted Cities" creates a magnificent, marginalized neighborhood in the likeness of Pilsen, and populates it not only with people like those who live there, but visible forces that resemble the invisible ones that ruled the author's youth in the place. The replica comes to life, and the stories are quite moving and illuminating.
There's so much here. Go buy a copy and read it.
If that's the case, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski just made Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood a place.
This book is a feat on par with Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes."
"Painted Cities" creates a magnificent, marginalized neighborhood in the likeness of Pilsen, and populates it not only with people like those who live there, but visible forces that resemble the invisible ones that ruled the author's youth in the place. The replica comes to life, and the stories are quite moving and illuminating.
There's so much here. Go buy a copy and read it.
February 7, 2014
Best book of stories of 2014, hands down.
August 5, 2024
These (often very) short stories paint a picture of the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Full of gangbangers, school-skipping teens, fierce parents, late-night blazes and everything in between, this microcosm spans the range of human emotions, potential, heartache and possibilities.
January 29, 2015
This is one of the best books I've read in a long while. Easily.
It's beautiful and poetic. The prose is very lyrical, but each sentence has a purpose, has a meaning and wealth of information, so it's not just wordy painting. The stories are touching and feel almost biographical - a series of vignettes interconnected to create a larger portrait of one narrator's memories of the Pilsen area on the Southside of Chicago.
There's a magical realism in these words, a flight of fantasy that glosses the guise of ordinary biography and adds a sense of youthful mysticism and wonder. Even among the stories about adults, this tone feels perfect. It's darkly mesmerizing and helps layer the sense of catharsis the author is careful to insert in each section.
I don't think I've read stories about soot and grime with a sense of overwhelming whimsy and fascination as these ones come off. This is either the greatest noir or the greatest fantasy story collection. I'm not sure which, as I'm still reeling from the narrator's soothing voice.
It's beautiful and poetic. The prose is very lyrical, but each sentence has a purpose, has a meaning and wealth of information, so it's not just wordy painting. The stories are touching and feel almost biographical - a series of vignettes interconnected to create a larger portrait of one narrator's memories of the Pilsen area on the Southside of Chicago.
There's a magical realism in these words, a flight of fantasy that glosses the guise of ordinary biography and adds a sense of youthful mysticism and wonder. Even among the stories about adults, this tone feels perfect. It's darkly mesmerizing and helps layer the sense of catharsis the author is careful to insert in each section.
I don't think I've read stories about soot and grime with a sense of overwhelming whimsy and fascination as these ones come off. This is either the greatest noir or the greatest fantasy story collection. I'm not sure which, as I'm still reeling from the narrator's soothing voice.
May 17, 2014
"Painted Cities" is a series of interconnected set in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago in the 70s. While the neighborhood is the unifying theme the tone of the stories tends between looking backwards with nostalgia mixed with disbelief or that of being in the moment as it happens. The poverty is only really apparent when looking backwards as is the casualness of death and violence. Violent acts are not day to day occurrences, but they happen with such frequency that the narrator can become inured and only realizes how prevalent death was in hindsight. It's a strong collection in the hard luck coming of age genre. The author manages to side step the most common problems of the genre. He only occasionally falters in the stories where he tries to hard to wrap things up neatly and spell out a message. It's best to leave that sort of interpretation up to the reader.
January 16, 2015
Painted Cities by Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski is a collection of short stories set on the south side of Chicago. They primarily center around adolescents who still lead fairly normal, imaginative lives before the crime, violence, gangs and drugs that surround them starts to color how they see and interact with the world.
One review said it was ‘authentic’ and I thought that was the perfect word to describe the stories. Until I hit one story about a boy who could bring back the dead (an out-of-place magical realism story that made its way into the book) I had no idea whether these stories were fiction or memoir – probably both. Although none made me stop and say ‘Wow!’, I really enjoyed this collection of stories.
One review said it was ‘authentic’ and I thought that was the perfect word to describe the stories. Until I hit one story about a boy who could bring back the dead (an out-of-place magical realism story that made its way into the book) I had no idea whether these stories were fiction or memoir – probably both. Although none made me stop and say ‘Wow!’, I really enjoyed this collection of stories.
December 12, 2020
a colorful, characterful, warm cloudburst of words
June 10, 2016
This collection focuses on a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. As its strongest, I got a real sense of the neighborhood and the people who lived there, but many of the pieces seem more like vignettes than stories and don't cohere that well. Throughout, we get a feel for a kind of fourth-world place where there are dreams but where there is also a kind of hopelessness that will never let those dreams come into being, save in the form of rare moments of beauty and art, crafted from dreams' destruction.
The first story focuses on daydreams--the way that a kid can dream of places and times in his past with a kind of idealism. Next, we turn to a story about panning for gold in the gutter, which becomes a kind of metaphor for looking for the treasure in life in a lower-class neighborhood, where nights consist of the sounds of fighting and sex and where people come together only when a building goes up in flame--over jealous love--with an entire family inside (not the kids too! they say).
I'm not sure what to make of the title story. Broken into four pieces, each piece focuses on a loss of some sort. The first section is about a graffitti mural. In that mural, a girl's tears turn out to be, when closely examined, reflections of the entire city down to the minutest details. The second section deals with gang shootings of a sort; the third focuses on the loss of a friend to the "underground," as he decides to go visit and live in the old city subway tunnels (one get the feeling we're talking about the underground as a meaphor for death); and the final section focuses on a puppeteer who calls forth dead Ritchie Valens for a mostly nonexistent audience.
One of the more successful stories in the book is "Freedom." It's the tale of two kids who make a rooftop their home--even going so far as to build a house of sorts on the roof. From that perch, they launch rocks at passersby for fun, until one day the rock throwing results in tragedy and their time of freedom comes to an end.
"Childhood" is about kids peeping toms and what results when they are finally caught at it. The story is mixed in with Catholic superstition (the disappearance of the Virgin creates a community stir) and guilt.
Another story split into parts is "Snakes." The first part focuses on folks who climb the El or who slink around in the underground like cave explorers. The next focuses on walls, and the next on what it is like to live in an Arab city. The piece closes with a short piece about proper etiquette at a wedding dance. How these pieces fit together, I was never able to quite figure.
Maximilian focues on three memories about Max (the narrator's cousin), two of them revolving around his fist--that is, fights that Max got into. The last story holds the most power, involving a funeral procession that is interrupted by a driver unwilling to wait. Max takes off after the driver and beats him up once he catches him. Was it worth the trouble?
"God's Country" is one of the better stories in the collection. It revolves around a kid named Chuey, who, as it turns out, has the gift of resurrection: he can raise dead things to life. There is some question as to the reality of this early on, but at the story proceeds, you come to believe in his power. But like a story of fantastic realism, the power is treated almost banally. The kids who gather round him get rather bored of watching Chuey raise dead animals, and even Chuey himself gets tired of using the power. Even miracles, as it turns out, are just a way to kill time during long and boring days as a kid. And coloring the whole story is a tragic event that makes the whole thing seem rather banal--raise the dead, but the neighborhood will kill no matter.
"Sides Streets" is another short piece that doesn't seem to quite add up. It's about different reactions to the death of a gangbanger named Casper: kids reenact his death; his mother disappears; the story moves into myth with no clear single reality.
"Blood" is an advice column--an older man dispensing advice to another kid in the neighborhood about how to be a man. How to act at a bar, and so on. It's an intriguing piece probably most because the form is so rarely used.
"Blue Magic" is the third story split into seemingly unrelated parts. The opening piece is the most intriguing here, explaining how a kid walks along the "edge" of the earth--namely his neighborhood, an area that he never leaves. I remember reading about how some people who grow in the inner city never leave a fairly small radius; it's as if their whole world is the neighborhood, and this story fits in with that kind of world vision.
"Growing Pains" is one of the more complete stories from Galavis-Budziszewski's Painted Cities collection, and as such, it's also one of the stories that resonates more fully. It's about a kid whose grandmother comes to visit his mother and him. The mother fled the grandmother a decade earlier, and the fact that they can't get along is evident on this visit. But so too are the mother's griefs at chances blown. Her friend Birdy comes back for a visit a couple of years earlier, and the mother becomes irate over Birdy's constant teasing about the mother not moving to California when she had the chance (there was a man involved, the narrator's father). The narrator suffers from arthritis--growing pains--though just a kid; it's as if aging happens much more quickly here in the hood, for as we learn, the mother was once part of a street gang that, even though only a decade has passed, is now defunct.
"Sacrifice" is another strong piece, in part because it is so harrowing. It involves a man and his wife and the man whom the husband killed, the wife's ex-boyfriend. Ironies are packed in this piece--and double identities. The husband is from one side of the neighborhood; the wife and her ex are from the other side of the neighborhood. The child they have is named after the ex-boyfriend; this child is in fact the ex's offspring. The ex stalks the family, gets help from the family. The husband threatens--repeatedly--to do something. He is just trying to protect his family; or was the ex just trying to protect his?
"Supernatural" makes of pollution in a neighborhood canal what most make of something like the appearance of the Virgin Mary. In these last stories, Galavis-Budziszewski moves into a kind of satire. This is the miracle that neighborhoods like this get--a green glow from waste that might just heal someone but that is certainly interesting to look at.
Just like looking at fires is the fun activity in "Ice Castles." Full of old buildings, each night features one of them going up in flames. Father and son head out to watch the firefighters, who are generally less than effective. What glory fills the night sky--and sometimes the morning's ground.
The first story focuses on daydreams--the way that a kid can dream of places and times in his past with a kind of idealism. Next, we turn to a story about panning for gold in the gutter, which becomes a kind of metaphor for looking for the treasure in life in a lower-class neighborhood, where nights consist of the sounds of fighting and sex and where people come together only when a building goes up in flame--over jealous love--with an entire family inside (not the kids too! they say).
I'm not sure what to make of the title story. Broken into four pieces, each piece focuses on a loss of some sort. The first section is about a graffitti mural. In that mural, a girl's tears turn out to be, when closely examined, reflections of the entire city down to the minutest details. The second section deals with gang shootings of a sort; the third focuses on the loss of a friend to the "underground," as he decides to go visit and live in the old city subway tunnels (one get the feeling we're talking about the underground as a meaphor for death); and the final section focuses on a puppeteer who calls forth dead Ritchie Valens for a mostly nonexistent audience.
One of the more successful stories in the book is "Freedom." It's the tale of two kids who make a rooftop their home--even going so far as to build a house of sorts on the roof. From that perch, they launch rocks at passersby for fun, until one day the rock throwing results in tragedy and their time of freedom comes to an end.
"Childhood" is about kids peeping toms and what results when they are finally caught at it. The story is mixed in with Catholic superstition (the disappearance of the Virgin creates a community stir) and guilt.
Another story split into parts is "Snakes." The first part focuses on folks who climb the El or who slink around in the underground like cave explorers. The next focuses on walls, and the next on what it is like to live in an Arab city. The piece closes with a short piece about proper etiquette at a wedding dance. How these pieces fit together, I was never able to quite figure.
Maximilian focues on three memories about Max (the narrator's cousin), two of them revolving around his fist--that is, fights that Max got into. The last story holds the most power, involving a funeral procession that is interrupted by a driver unwilling to wait. Max takes off after the driver and beats him up once he catches him. Was it worth the trouble?
"God's Country" is one of the better stories in the collection. It revolves around a kid named Chuey, who, as it turns out, has the gift of resurrection: he can raise dead things to life. There is some question as to the reality of this early on, but at the story proceeds, you come to believe in his power. But like a story of fantastic realism, the power is treated almost banally. The kids who gather round him get rather bored of watching Chuey raise dead animals, and even Chuey himself gets tired of using the power. Even miracles, as it turns out, are just a way to kill time during long and boring days as a kid. And coloring the whole story is a tragic event that makes the whole thing seem rather banal--raise the dead, but the neighborhood will kill no matter.
"Sides Streets" is another short piece that doesn't seem to quite add up. It's about different reactions to the death of a gangbanger named Casper: kids reenact his death; his mother disappears; the story moves into myth with no clear single reality.
"Blood" is an advice column--an older man dispensing advice to another kid in the neighborhood about how to be a man. How to act at a bar, and so on. It's an intriguing piece probably most because the form is so rarely used.
"Blue Magic" is the third story split into seemingly unrelated parts. The opening piece is the most intriguing here, explaining how a kid walks along the "edge" of the earth--namely his neighborhood, an area that he never leaves. I remember reading about how some people who grow in the inner city never leave a fairly small radius; it's as if their whole world is the neighborhood, and this story fits in with that kind of world vision.
"Growing Pains" is one of the more complete stories from Galavis-Budziszewski's Painted Cities collection, and as such, it's also one of the stories that resonates more fully. It's about a kid whose grandmother comes to visit his mother and him. The mother fled the grandmother a decade earlier, and the fact that they can't get along is evident on this visit. But so too are the mother's griefs at chances blown. Her friend Birdy comes back for a visit a couple of years earlier, and the mother becomes irate over Birdy's constant teasing about the mother not moving to California when she had the chance (there was a man involved, the narrator's father). The narrator suffers from arthritis--growing pains--though just a kid; it's as if aging happens much more quickly here in the hood, for as we learn, the mother was once part of a street gang that, even though only a decade has passed, is now defunct.
"Sacrifice" is another strong piece, in part because it is so harrowing. It involves a man and his wife and the man whom the husband killed, the wife's ex-boyfriend. Ironies are packed in this piece--and double identities. The husband is from one side of the neighborhood; the wife and her ex are from the other side of the neighborhood. The child they have is named after the ex-boyfriend; this child is in fact the ex's offspring. The ex stalks the family, gets help from the family. The husband threatens--repeatedly--to do something. He is just trying to protect his family; or was the ex just trying to protect his?
"Supernatural" makes of pollution in a neighborhood canal what most make of something like the appearance of the Virgin Mary. In these last stories, Galavis-Budziszewski moves into a kind of satire. This is the miracle that neighborhoods like this get--a green glow from waste that might just heal someone but that is certainly interesting to look at.
Just like looking at fires is the fun activity in "Ice Castles." Full of old buildings, each night features one of them going up in flames. Father and son head out to watch the firefighters, who are generally less than effective. What glory fills the night sky--and sometimes the morning's ground.
February 12, 2021
A beautifully sad series of vignettes revolving around children and young adults living in Pilsen, a predominately Latinx neighborhood of Chicago. It's filled with a lot of heartbreaking moments, and magical realism, and while there isn't a defined through-line, the book is a cohesive look at how the area feels to grow up in.
July 6, 2024
Very pretty writing, nice stories and shift in points of view, characters going in and out. I love especially the image of the underground Chicago and the couch on the roof.
Somebody clearly read and liked Stuart Dybek
Somebody clearly read and liked Stuart Dybek
June 23, 2018
I really enjoyed this collection of stories. I think what stirred me is the addition of another Latino voice in Literature.
October 3, 2025
loved the vinnette about the badass stocky grandma
July 6, 2014
This collection of linked stories set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen in the '70s and '80s does a great job of capturing a sense of place. The narrator of the first story puts it like this: "I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt like. I try to piece together image from that" (2). The Pilsen of this book is a place of gangbangers and guns and drugs, a place where there's a shootout at a cotillion and where the guy who lives upstairs "would have loud parties that ended up in fistfights at 3 a.m., people falling down our three-flat's stairs, creative insults being slung in the stairwell, bottles being thrown on the front sidewalk" (7). But it's also a place of childhood wonder and ease, summer streetscapes with open hydrants, kids playing in the water, competitions between blocks to see whose hydrants could shoot the highest jets. These stories capture the sounds and smells of this place: "frying tacos, boiling pots of garlic-spiced frijoles, cool Lake Michigan breezes transported by miles of sewer pipe," and "how the expressway sounded from underneath, the high whine of tires, the low drone of truck engines, the shudder of engine brakes" (21, 137). This is a neighborhood of hiding spots and secrets: there's a great story in which the narrator climbs to a pierogi factory's roof, where he and a new friend carve out a space for themselves for a time; there's another great story in which the narrator and his friends eavesdrop on another friend's mother having sex in the apartment upstairs. But the stories aren't all realism: there's one that features a vision of an underground city connected to the aboveground one, and one in which the narrator's friend can bring back the dead. But I like the realistic descriptive passages best, passages like this:
Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday's fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day's worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. (55)
March 17, 2015
While browsing through books at a local thrift store, I came across this uncorrected proof of Painted Cities. I had not heard of Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski or this book, so, pulling out my phone, I checked a few of the reviews of the book here, then decided to add it to the handful of other books I was going to bring home.
Echoing a number of other reviews here, Galaviz-Budziszewski's writing is poetic, often lyrical; and yes, it reminded me of Sherman Alexie in its cadence and tone.
Most of the stories are written in first-person memoire fashion, so, I suspect that the stories, are—to a degree—biographical in nature, or at least draw heavily from the author's childhood. I found it very easy to relate to the stories as they took me back to my childhood days, albeit sans the street gangs and rundown neighbourhood, when I and my friends would climb roofs or explore ruins of buildings in order to entertain ourselves.
One of the stories is a fantasy, of sorts, involving a friend who was able to revive dead beings. Still, the tale is told in such a way that I almost believed it could happen; I almost wished that it had. It is more a fable about learning lessons, I suppose, although it also sort of questions whether or not the decisions we make actually determine our outcomes. How much does chance play in the paths our lives take? Is success or failure ultimately within our control?
Echoing a number of other reviews here, Galaviz-Budziszewski's writing is poetic, often lyrical; and yes, it reminded me of Sherman Alexie in its cadence and tone.
Most of the stories are written in first-person memoire fashion, so, I suspect that the stories, are—to a degree—biographical in nature, or at least draw heavily from the author's childhood. I found it very easy to relate to the stories as they took me back to my childhood days, albeit sans the street gangs and rundown neighbourhood, when I and my friends would climb roofs or explore ruins of buildings in order to entertain ourselves.
One of the stories is a fantasy, of sorts, involving a friend who was able to revive dead beings. Still, the tale is told in such a way that I almost believed it could happen; I almost wished that it had. It is more a fable about learning lessons, I suppose, although it also sort of questions whether or not the decisions we make actually determine our outcomes. How much does chance play in the paths our lives take? Is success or failure ultimately within our control?
April 15, 2015
Yay, this book was finally available at the library! *success kid meme*
This book came out a few years ago and is about the troubled times in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen where I briefly lived in 2013 but the book takes place in the 70s. It is still a dangerous neighborhood that is slowly becoming gentrified but progress on that seems to be at a standstill for now. This book is more of a collective set of stories that interweave with characters and it was awesome. The stories focus around different young boys in the neighborhood and the things that were going on at the time, mainly gang wars and killings. The stories were great and it was really cool to know where certain things were taking place as I used to pass by Dvorak Park on Cullerton all the time as it was across from my apartment, etc. It made the reading process even more engrossing.
This book came out a few years ago and is about the troubled times in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen where I briefly lived in 2013 but the book takes place in the 70s. It is still a dangerous neighborhood that is slowly becoming gentrified but progress on that seems to be at a standstill for now. This book is more of a collective set of stories that interweave with characters and it was awesome. The stories focus around different young boys in the neighborhood and the things that were going on at the time, mainly gang wars and killings. The stories were great and it was really cool to know where certain things were taking place as I used to pass by Dvorak Park on Cullerton all the time as it was across from my apartment, etc. It made the reading process even more engrossing.
October 1, 2014
Decent short stories and vignettes about life in the Chicano areas of Chicago, that read as much like memoir as fiction. Some characters show up in different stories. General theme might be coming of age, and I think the books would be perfect for younger audience, high school perhaps. Certainly a Chicago audience will get the references best, but I really didn't have much trouble following along, as many of the incidents are somewhat universal.
April 1, 2015
Really excellent set of short stories set in Pilsen on Chicago's south side. Gangs, fires, resurrection from the dead all figure, but at their heart they're about growing up in the neighborbood in the 70s and 80s. Consolidates my long-held (and controversial?) opinion that Dave Eggers is better at picking out great writers than he is at writing himself.
October 25, 2014
I really want to like this book. It is a series of short stories loosely hung around Jesse, the protagonist of the story. They pieces are incredibly well written, but I felt that it lacked a coherent story.
September 25, 2014
The imagery in Painted Cities makes Chicago come alive.
Similar to "This is How you Lose Her" in the interconnected-short-stories-in-an-urban-Latino-hood, but these show more love for the place & time they represent.
Similar to "This is How you Lose Her" in the interconnected-short-stories-in-an-urban-Latino-hood, but these show more love for the place & time they represent.
February 20, 2015
Fun collection of short stories set it Pilsen. It's cool to hear buildings and places mentioned that I remember from my childhood. I'd recommend this and I'm going to be on the lookout for the next book from this author.
August 17, 2015
A series of vignettes set in Chicago's South Side from a variety of perspectives. Captures the magic and the tragedy of life lived close to the edge. #thssummershelfie
July 21, 2014
Written about a neighborhood where the author grew up. It worked. I felt it like poetry. Part of a McSweeney's windfall of publications from my daughter Stacia. A real treat.
October 3, 2014
Chicago Pilsen Archer Chicago churros Chicago.
April 20, 2015
Listening to him read and getting the opportunity for a brief chat, Latino a Latina renewed my spirit. This is an incredible collection of secrets embedded within stories only he can tell.
February 1, 2016
I miss living at 16th and Allport. Really enjoyed the way this neck of the woods was captured in this book.
April 4, 2019
This is direct, heartbreaking but ultimately very honest about life in Pilsen and other poverty stricken communities that struggle with violence, instability and racism. It's good to read about how people find meaning, love and connection even in these places but it also leaves me wishing they could have more opportunities for love, connection, and empowerment.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews