The Chicago East India Company

PUSHCART-NOMINATED FICTION ABOUT POST-9/11 AMERICA FROM AN AMERICAN VETERANWhile America carried on with Pax Americana, a generation of men were asked to watch children suffer without as much as a flinch, then return home and continue as America has for decades. When the men returned, they brought with them unexpected cargo that is shaping the future of America in unintended ways. In The Chicago East India Company, a series of short stories and vignettes walk the reader through the consequences of two decades of war, and the attitudes it creates. An eighteen-year-old realizes his mortality and is punished for it by his peers;A soldier returns from the wars only to realize he's teaching the colonized in his own city;A young couple go to Central America and see the effects of the West on class and opportunity;Members of a platoon hunt to find a traitorous Afghan spy;A man spends his days adhering to a strict and ridiculous routine to ward off the bad magic that is always around the corner.Lyke's setting shifts in time and place but forever casts the main character of The Chicago East India Company as someone trying to maintain his sanity, his humanity, and his kindness as the state and its bureaucratic inefficiencies unknowingly try to take them away.In the tradition of Camus, Orwell or Steinbeck, Lyke's work illuminates human nature and seeks the truth hidden under layers of grit.