with expectations so high after Coast of Chicago-I couldn't believe that Magellan surpassed it. I truly enjoed Perry's threading through the narrative. It was like listening to stories of extended families and communities where I have to pause to remember the relationship of my Mother's cousin's husband's best pal that ended up falling into a dumpster after golfing all day and drinking through the night-only to stumble off the path back to the Chrystler into the dumpster. I am incrediby biased t...

Dybek writes love stories about southside Chicago. He tells stories like snapping tons of quick photographs, rushing depictions images of Polish families shopping during Sunday mass, saxophone bleating uncles, war veterans drinking while bartending, and intense moments of fleeting love. These are beautiful stories, filled with sensual experiences, even when characters are riding in old cars or listening to El pass them by in tiny apartments. Or maybe even more sensual because of those sounds and...

This is a book of eleven short stories ,it takes place in Chicago’s south Side in the 1950s—1960s it is a bleak and sad landscape populated by hard people,a few Italian mobsters and a few bag ladies, the stories are somewhat connected by a young “ Perry Katzek “a young Polish native of Chicago’s “ little village “,one of the many neighborhoods of Chicago,I grew up on the south side in the neighborhood of Hyde Park about a thousand miles from Little Village. In this book there is a lot of violenc...

Sometimes you tear through a book in one day; other times, it takes years. Either way, it could end up as one of your favorites. I read the first four stories in I Sailed With Magellan several years ago. I got sidetracked, most likely by college, and never finished it--although I enjoyed it. At the time, I probably would've rated it like 3.5. More importantly, though, I just forgot about it; and when I saw it on my shelf, I didn't feel the slightest urge to pick it up and read it.Then, last mont...

I wonder if the dominance of bildungsroman narratives in the shnovels (linked books of short stories) I've surveyed indicates a modern realization about the nature of growing up. It isn't linear or clean, a smooth line of story unspooling over years, and the collage approach of books like Local Girls and this one seems a better fit for our current understanding of memory and childhood.At any rate, a bildungs-shnovel is more or less what this is; along the way, a portrait of place and yet another...

In this collection of connected short stories, we are given various portraits of a boy coming of age in a family, and a city, that is fierce, divided, and undyingly loyal. With his clean, precise prose, Dybek puts every word to the test, allowing no extraneous descriptions, no weak verbs, no unspecific nouns. Take, for example, these lines from his story “Orchid,” describing a drive through the city: “We were in third doing fifty through the pinging dust along the curb, passing semis on the rig...

Interconnected stories about Chicago. sometimes I didn't totally understand how the stories connected. All in one neighborhood or one family in the neighborhood - I guess.I think I heard Dybek speak at a ALA program in Chicago which would have been appropriate and also would explain why one story seemed very familiar.My favorite story was "We Didn't" which may be the one that was read to us.Worth reading if you like short stories - much of it was serious, but there were definitely some funny bit...

Worth it for the story 'We Didn't' alone.

“But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matt...

Short, interconnected stories follow the life of Perry Katzek and his experiences while growing up in Chicago. Like his Coast of Chicago, which I remember loving years ago when I read it for the One Book One Chicago, this novel-in-stories is sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy, and shows the author’s obvious love of this gritty and beautiful city.

I eagerly awaited the opportunity to read this book after having been blown away by Dybek’s previous stories about growing up in a (1950s, 60s ?) Chicago white ethnic south side community (The Coast of Chicago, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods). I Sailed’s stories journey from boyhood to the cusp of adulthood. They are linked by common characters, but are vastly different from one another in tone. The dark and violent “Breasts” contrasts with the playful “A Minor Mood” and the sweetly nostalgic...

A few years back, I had the fortunate opportunity to have lunch with Stewart Dybek (though it's unlikely he'll remember it as much as I did). He was quite delightful during the meal as we talked about his work, my past delusions of being a creative writer, and my current studies at SIU-C.So, flash-forward several years, and I finally get around to reading I Sailed with Magellan, his follow-up to Chicago Stories, with which I was more familiar. Regardless, my brief and pleasant encounter had not

alexsandar hemon name checked dybek as a great and influential writer to him in his recent occasional memoir The Book of My Lives and one can tell right off why. dybek is fantastic, and he conjures the old chicago neighborhoods of polish czech mexican black puerto rican russian packed in the strictly, though invisible (most everybody was terribly and equally poor, cept the rich banksters), demarcated territories. dybek uses smells and sounds as much as dialog and characterization and plot to bri...

While there was no single story in this collection that I loved as much as my favorites from Coast of Chicago, I think that overall, this is probably the better book. The echoes between the stories, for some reason, really distracted me, although they probably would be more appropriately seen as a masterful interweaving of stories. I read the book over the course of several months, which I think was wise, because when I read the last 100 pages in one big push, I found myself rolling my eyes a bi...

Dybek's been called Chicago's James Joyce over and over again, and every collection he puts out gets hailed as his Dubliners. Unlike most of my favorite writers, dude does not shy away from love stories. This book made me knee-bucklingly nostalgic for stuff I never came remotely close to experiencing.

My friend Brian turned me on to Dybek with story "PET Milk." It stuck with me, as do the stories in this collection.Dybek has a gentleness, a backdoor entrance to the rapture room. Man, I'm flamin' away here...

Stu Dybek is one of the best writers in America today--he's a writer's writer, but he's also a reader's writer. he writes with the cadence, phrasing and eye of a poet. But his characters are real, their dramas unique and poignant, the plots engaging and interesting, and the prose is all together lovely.

The blue boy story captivated me completely. Others were good, minus Breasts. Dybek entranced me for the first time when I read Chopin in Winter from his other collection, The Coast of Chicago. Hot damn, I read that story in 2000 and it still rattles me when I think about it 13 years later.

After reading of Dybek's collection of novel-in-stories, I Sailed with Magellan, it is hard to resist the sense that contested dreams, memories and what remains unspoken between us are what most deepen the love we have for others and for ourselves. These dreams, memories, and secret thoughts and feelings may fuel our greatest creations; may turn us into endearing fools; or bring us luck; may make possible living on for another day; or grant us a long circuitous lifetime. Even if these memories a...

I wanted a feel for Chicago, so I picked up this book, and it certainly did give me a feel for immigrant communities, especially the Polish community, on Chicago's South Side, and for the city in general. Honestly, I struggled through most of the stories in this book. It's billed as a "novel in stories," which is more true in this case than in most books that are billed as such. The character in most of the stories is Perry Katzek. There is a brutal and gritty side to many of these stories, espe...