Record Palace

"Record Palace is an astonishment. Susan Wheeler's deft touch an flawless ear have produced an irresistible work, both fresh and sage."—Toni Morrison

“Ten years ago I was stopped cold by Susan Wheeler’s poetry. She has done it again with her fiction—an exquisitely crafted recollection of music, at a pivotal time for both jazz and Chicago.” —Steve Martin

In Record Palace, Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history—to be anywhere but where she came from—Thousand Oaks, California: tract housing, mock-stucco buildings, “incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blond girl.”

Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records—all jazz. And it has Acie, “big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds.” Cindy knows she doesn’t belong, and this is why she stays.

Cindy’s determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie’s son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime.

With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Wheeler—an award-winning poet—offers a stunning portrait of a woman searching for an identity in a city on the cusp of social and political change.