In case you don’t have much attention span this week, maybe you could try Barry Gifford’s collection of short stories, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings.

I mean, these are short-shorts, and no fancy words. Fancy talk wouldn’t sound right, describing the Chicago neighborhood where a tween boy named Roy and his friend Jimmy Boyle tramp the sidewalks, on their way to a movie, a school carnival, an after-school job.

This is a world where everybody has a nickname — Viper, Goat, Sharkface — and where the Irish rub elbows with the Croatians and the Chinese, and where the boys’ fondest wishes are to:

1) Make friends with the fast girls;
2) grow up and get away from Chicago’s beastly weather.

Meanwhile, on their way to the movie, they might find a dead body on the sidewalk. Yeah, they’ve seen a few of those. What can you expect when, mixed in among the Irish, the Croatians and the Chinese, you have “The Outfit”?

This is a place where they say, “He was a knee breaker that needed his knees broke.” The best fathers around here are the ones at the local parish, who talk young boys out of decisions they’ll regret.

Sad Stories is a quick read, and not as sad as the title suggests. Gifford can make you feel the wind and the gray slush.

It’s certainly a break from your Anne of Green Gables fare.

Photo credits:

“furn . . .” :: like, totally on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Apartments: reallyboring on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND

“liq . . .”: like, totally on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Salon scissors: Urban Woodswalker on Visualhunt.com/ CC BY-NC-ND