Fantastic short story collection. Launched straight into my Top 10 of all time. Chicago's streets, immigrant lives, dreamy America, beautiful eccentricities. This is a vivid world painted with Dybek's unique palette. His prose is so accessible and so exceptionally crackling without being showy or inauthentic like you sometimes get in Wells Tower, for example. Dybek never trips over himself. As a writer, I may just sit down and chart how he starts sentences; he has wonderful variety and rhythm. "...

Ever read James Joyce's "Araby"? Dybek's stories are a lot like that. They have a nostalgic feel. Many of them are written from the perspectives of children/adolescents discovering new aspects of their worlds--namely, the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago. These are places that may still exist, but surely not as described by Dybek, who writes of yesteryear. These kids inhabit a sort of wonderland (a time/place that no longer exists); as a result, the stories have a fabulist feel even though most o...

I first heard of Stuart Dybek through reading an interview with George Saunders and since I work in a library (“well, then why does he seem so god-DAMN stupid?!!”) I popped right up and snagged this one and I’m happy I did. I think of palatski (a treat that I can only imagine, having Googled it and found myself frustratingly directed back to the source of my question), chicken blood, and pervert ushers lurking in nightmare theaters when I think of this.

For me, some of the stories are brilliant, some eccentric, some surreal, some nightmarish or a combination of all of these things. I found the writing compelling, the characters interesting and enjoyed the gritty urban setting of 50s-60s Chicago. This is a unique reading experience.

Modern and place oriented fairy tales that I loved or didn't like. No in between for me 😊

[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the...

Dybek is a second generation Polish American born and raised in Chicago. This is a novel in stories, of his adolescent heroes with grimy urban backgrounds of the South Side of the city in the 1970s, the common factor being hopes and dream in adversity, not yet metamorphosed into nightmares. This was my first experience of Dybek, and it wasn't long before I realised I was in the hands of a master. Rarely have I read such a collection of what in effect are short stories with such consistent brilli...

Dybek draws you in with stunningly evocative tales of slavic Chicago in the '50s and '60s. The blue collar ethnic, Catholic culture he draws from was just a few miles west of my Southside childhood but might as well have been on the other side of the world. The writing is as rich and raw as the duck's blood one of stories' many unfortuate children must procure for his ailing grandmother. (And mention of poultry reminds me to tell you pigeon fans that there are plenty of those.) The landscape is

This collection was a game changer for me. I was beginning to study writing fiction, and working it out for myself, when along came this book. I have first edition, with its green dustjacket, that I had Stu sign for me when I first met him. It was the first time I connected with material about Chicago that wasn't Sister Carrie, or the like. I remember reading the first story in the collection sort of breathlessly -- seeing where the characters were running, what it looked like -- the grassy lots...

Dybek's early work is, if possible, even more intense and hypnotizing than his later masterpieces Coast of Chicago and I Sailed with Magellan. He combines the classic melancholy of Joyce with the earthy fatality of Dostoyevsky, then condenses all of this emotion into stories that rarely waste a word. His early work betrays his training as a poet: the metaphors are vivid and pulsing, the images stark, the young characters as complex and confused as we can all remember. This collection is not one

These stories, all set in Chicago, are arranged in an arc from youngest protagonist to oldest, and then the last two--probably the most emotionally powerful--are again about young, abandoned boys. The specific setting is usually one of the South Side neighborhoods of poor Polish and other Eastern European immigrants. The stories were originally written/published in the 1970s, and they are set in decades prior to that one.Dybek's mastery of gritty imagery--smells, sights, sounds, textures--of wor...

My teacher in the MFA program at Western Michigan University, graduated 1984. I went there from Grand Rapids to work specifically with him after reading this book, then his poetry that I didn't like quite as much, and every story I could get my hands on. He admitted me to the program after a pitcher of beer at a K-zoo bar; I had sent him a couple of my stories, but we never talked about them, we just told stories of Michigan. He had read the stories, he said, as we left for our cars, and liked t...

This was my first reading of Dybek's debut collection of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Although these stories do not gut me as much as his later works, particularly my favorite of his collections I Sailed With Magellan, his prose throughout these stories definitely makes you itch to go and write. As always, I love Dybek's ability to cultivate memorable settings, especially his knack at keeping place vivid and present throughout a story. One of the most inspirational aspects o...

I’ve made a point of getting all the Dybek I can lay my hands on - no easy feat in the UK. I was glad I did, even if half my copy has pencilled annotations and a bookmark from a Dublin Catholic Church. No one’s prose fizzes quite like Dybek’s. He writes of city life with gritty exactitude and a sense of wonder. He is Chicago’s answer to Alasdair Gray. No one serious about the art of the short story should ignore him.

While I made it through this whole collection, very few of these stories made me feel much of anything. This was his debut, and he clearly already had descriptive prowess, but a lot of these stories just fizzled out

Once again the amazing Hester recommended an author to me that can do in his prose with effortlessness what I struggle to achieve in a sentence. Dybek writes brave, true, seedy and poignant stories about growing up--that alternately mena and vulnerable time when you can get away with nothing and everything and want to evaporate and be noticed. The stories are all set in Chicago which adds an element of grit and danger specific to urban life.

Prose as poetry. Words for the sake of their beauty. Stories that go nowhere but take you on a journey. I loved this collection. Not everything has to tell a grand tale or make a point. Sometimes words can just take you to a place in time and show you a glimpse of life. That is what Dybek has done here. Thank you again and again, Sir.

I just didn't vibe with this in terms of conflict and character. Story after story I found myself not wanting to go on, so eventually I stopped reading like 60% of the way through. An interesting view of 50s and 60s Polish Chicago, yes, but not to the degree I wanted.

Thus far, "The Wake" is my favorite story. The one about the two little boys trying to find goose blood for grandma's soup was pretty memorable, too.***What a strong debut collection-- can't wait to read his more mature work. In terms of range and tone and tenor, these stories all live in the same register and share a lot in terms of plot and theme too-- versions of the hero's journey, loss of innocence, etc.. But Dybek's take on these these familiar elements, within the vivid and even lurid set...

Stuart and my dad were friends growing up, so a lot of his short stories are like looking into my father's childhood, even if they might not actually be his own stories. However, "The Long Thoughts" is an exception~ as my dad is a core character in this particular story (Vulk). Stuart is a very talented writer and I personally appreciate this story. :)