As a first-generation American, author Barry Pearce has a soft spot for folks who can’t catch a break. “I see the city as a place of incredible opportunity, but always, I think, from a tenuous place, with the eyes of an outsider,” he says.

Pearce grew up within spitting distance of Midway Airport, in a two-bedroom row house with his Irish immigrant parents and six siblings. The first in his family to attend college, the 56-year-old Albany Park resident and former journalist has ghostwritten 20 nonfiction books. He started drawing attention for his fiction in 2019, winning the Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for “Chez Whatever,” about a South Side woman questioning her love for her Lincoln Park girlfriend. That short story links thematically to the eight others soon to be published in The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories, his first book under his own name.

A volunteer docent for the Chicago Architecture Center, Pearce places his narratives in neighborhoods across the city, from Rogers Park to South Shore. “For lots of writers, setting doesn’t much matter. For me, it’s everything,” he notes. “It’s generative. The stories aren’t just set in Chicago, they’re about Chicago. They grow out of the conditions and tensions shaping the neighborhoods where they’re set. In my mind, they wouldn’t work anywhere else.”

Characters whose fates are crimped by bad luck or poor decisions populate Pearce’s City of Big Shoulders. They are inspired by people with experiences very different from his: immigrants from Mexico, Somalia, and Poland; a Gold Coast socialite; a Holocaust survivor. “My life seems dull compared to the colorful fabric of the lives around me,” he says. “I’d make a terrible memoirist.” But thanks to Pearce’s direct and empathetic storytelling, readers don’t need to have walked their streets to connect with these folks.

The Plan of Chicago comes out November 11.