Dybek's lush lyrical language, control of the image, and his willingness to take flights into the fantastic make this a delightful collection of stories that becomes more a meditation on love, art (and the art of love), desire and the role of story in this thing we call being human.

5 stars for the lush brilliance of stories such as Paper Lantern. 3 stars for about half of the stories, which had perfect moments but ultimately didn't work for me

So hard to evaluate story collections without just rehashing the individual plots. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed this one, like I have with all of Dybek’s books.

"I realized we can never predict when these few, special moments will occur...How, if we hadn't met, I wouldn't be standing on a bridge, watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one's life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that's what falling in love means - the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves." -from the story "Paper Lanterns"This book is aptly subtitled "Love Stories," but also, they're all stories abou...

Wonderful book of stories! Astonishingly under rated and under appreciated. A literary classic and a great read. Varied stylistically. Dybek doesn't publish many books. I'd wish he would, but I'm grateful that he spends the time to make them good. I intend to reread it, even though time doesn't allow me to read all the great books coming out. I realize it isn't for everyone. The reasons for the lower ratings are understandable. I think I've said enough to reach many who should read it.

Here is my review of PAPER LANTERN from the San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July, 2014 Paper Lantern by Stuart DybekFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 207 pages, $24.00Ecstatic Cahoots by Stuart DybekFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pages, $15.00REVIEWED BY VALERIE MINERJune is a great month to celebrate fiction with the publication of Stuart Dybek’s two effervescent, musical collections, Paper Lantern, nine love stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots, fifty short-short stories. His characters explore urban Chicago a...

a nice collectiondybek is a great visual wordsmith, with creative exciting imaginative word usage and analogies and twists and turns, as much as there are in literary fiction, but his storytelling is a bit loose, and doesnt grab mehis word choice and descriptions are always amazing thogood overall collectionmight be better if i knew what love was, haha

Really interesting stories . creative and make you pause. I really loved Ecstatic Cahoots and how imaginative those stories were. it's hard to compete with that. But these are great pre bedtime reads too.

Great set of stories by a master. At his best, Dybek infuses his work with an intriguing, understated mystery that sets them apart. This book could serve as a textbook on how to write short stories. Each tale is as fragile and fleeting as the title suggests.

Definitely disappointed that I did not enjoy this book. With such good reviews, I thought it would be an enjoyable read. Instead, I found myself dragging through it, feeling miserable!

If you enjoy literary fiction, including in short story form, you will love this collection. Stuart Dybek is a very talented, experienced writer and does a fantastic job with both character and place in a relatively few number of pages. These are all love stories in a sense, but each unique. The expressions and types of love are a part of that difference, as is the way the author journeys into the story. His students are very lucky writers, indeed.

I've read and loved all of Dybek's books, but nothing prepared me for this. These stories are wild, and different, and strange, and amazing.

Absolutely love Paper Lantern, the story. The rest of the stories here are frankly hard to make sense of on first reading, though they are enchantingly written.

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...Review by Lacey N. DunhamStuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern: Love Stories should be sold with a warning: do not read if you’re recovering from recent heartbreak. Or, more properly, if you’ve ever experienced heartbreak. Set mainly in the Midwest, and in particular Dybek’s beloved Chicago, he writes head on about the city’s poor and working class with the same ease as he examines the inner lives of over-educated academics. Each of the nine stories in the collecti...

I'm so happy that it's over! None of these short stories caught my attention. I was really close to throwing this book across my room. I feel bad since a friend of mine recommend Stuart Dyberk. I'm going to give him another chance and read another book.

Nine short stories previously published in magazines between 1995 and 2012. Although subtitled love stories they might more accurately be described as fictional nostalgic reminisces of erotic encounters that didn’t work out so well for the participants. Most are set in Chicago. Dybek’s style is littered with allusions to other works of literature, painting, opera, cinema, and popular culture. This in not to say that it’s not skillful or literary; it very much abounds in these techniques. However...

This collection was frequently overthought and overwrought but had two moments of pure magic: the surreal wanderings of Oceanic, and the perfect morsel of a titular story (although Paper Lantern is best consumed not in the book, but rather as read by ZZ Packer on the New Yorker Fiction podcast).

It's hard to find fault in any collection of Dybek stories; I've missed his writing and am glad to read more from his pen. Even if you're not a fan of love stories, don't be fooled by the title - love is the clay to this Potter; watching what he does with the medium is dazzling.

[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...

This was from a New Yorker Podcast, read by ZZ Packer. About forty minutes with an introduction and closing discussion with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, it is thoroughly entertaining, really quite daunting in style and device. I've replayed the reading several times and expect quite a few more.