Old Style

An illustrated book set in Chicago bars between 9/11 and The Plague.A new revised paperback edition with an added story."If you let men write books about working in bars, they will talk about people who pissed their pants. And like, not much else. The men in these stories will piss their pants several times. I don't know if they just think that pissing your pants is funny and grunge or if they assume that they have to include every instance of pants-pissing. They will talk about over-serving customers and weird bosses with hoarding problems and that one guy who won't leave and wants to argue with you about nothing. We know these people and they're problematic faves.They will also think that they're blurring the lines between auto-fiction and the novel form when they're probably just saying exactly what happened through a misogynistic lens and changing some people's names. Neither of these things make for a good book. The protagonist has always just ended things with some woman out of his league or an older female character. Maybe he's violent towards her and glosses over it. Maybe every other man is violent towards his corresponding woman and he thinks he's better than them because he isn't. Not being evil doesn't make you good (or even neutral)." -Ella Dixon from Goodreads, December 7, 2022