I was not familiar with Stuart Dybek's stories until I recently listened to the New Yorker fiction podcast of ZZ Packer reading Dybek's wonderful "Paper Lantern." That story is not in this collection; it's in "Paper Lantern," a book of nine stories also published last year, at the same time as "Ecstatic Cahoots." Here you'll find fifty short -- many very short -- stories that are often weird and mostly wonderful. This is "Misterioso," the first story in the book, in its entirety:"You're going to...

I had to sort of speed-read the last couple of stories in here because my copy was due at the library. It's a ridiculous and stupid thing to have to do, like speed-reading poetry. I didn't like all the stories but when there's 50 of them odds are one or two won't be to your liking. Most of them, however, are. Dybek has some really great "lyrical" writing (an adjective I've never stooped to use before) and finds the mother of invention in the minutest of details. For every gross horny-dad sex sce...

3.5 ish, inspiring for sure, but not as memorable as I'd hoped!

Here is my review of PAPER LANTERN from the San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July, 2014Paper 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 and...

Beautiful, weird, remarkable little stories. I enjoyed about 40 out of 50 of them very much.

I was fairly impatient with this book. Partly my own fault: with something so short--comprising bite-sized pieces, many not even be long enough to be called flash fiction--I feel the urge to finish very quickly. Many of the pieces were prose poems and poems require time and stillness to appreciate. A lot of the pieces were very dreamy... and hearing about someone else's dreams is rarely satisfying. And there were so many of them. I don't remember The Coast of Chicago being like this. Still, some...

[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...

50 short stories in 200 pages, so short shorts. and while dybek is no lydia davis, he would be perfectly acceptable to your yuppie older brother, or straight lace suburb neighbor, if they read books that is.dybek is full of tenderness and sentimentality, made good by setting them mostly in the poor and mean streets of chicago, where tenderness could get you killed, or beat up, or laughed at anyway. so a certain bravery too, to these stories of love, mostly.

Sensual, mysterious, and great shifts of form and content.

This is my first Dybek collection and I found it brilliant. His use of language and his way of turning a descriptive phrase is not to be missed. I am a fan of flash fiction, of which this collection contains several. The opening story, 'Mysterioso', I found to be phenomenal at setting a scene and letting you know the characters with so few words it is genius. I have his collection Paper Lanterns on my TBR, which I will dig out ASAP. Recommended.

I really liked this book. If you're checking this out you probably already read a review that recommended it. I second that.

It's hard not to have a real affection for these stories, since I think a lot of these stories were written, or at least seeing print, when I was Dybek's student-- he had a rare talent for placing things in the NYer and smaller mags, and it was, to me at the time, the smaller mags where Dybek was doing the interesting stuff.Now, twenty years or so later, I'm a little less bowled over by these stories, having read some things since-- Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, etc-- that I think do more with the

Beautiful, sometimes mesmerizing collection of short (sometimes very short) stories from one of the real masters of the form. These stories are sometimes linked (several stories involve characters named Gil and Bea) but mostly they just have recurring themes and motifs (looking back at the Jazz Age, intimacy and vulnerability, mist, snowfall, Chicago). I tended to prefer the more realist stories in this book, but occasionally a story like "Swing," with strong metaphorical content, would knock me...

I had a chance recently to hear Stuart Dybek read at the College of DuPage, and really liked the story he read which is included in this collection.With 50 stories, it has to be expected that some are great and some are forgettable.There is much to think about here. Often the stories are arranged so that a word or idea in one story emerges in the next. There is remarkable lyricism, and often remarkable weirdness. Some of the shortest stories are fragments.

Bring your dream-brain, poetical brain, lover's brain to the reading and you'll be just fine. Good stuff.

Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (2014) is a collection of micro-fiction by Stuart Dybek, ranging from one to five or six pages in length. Pithy and often macabre, Dybek’s style, to me, seems reminiscent of both Flannery O’Connor and Edward Albee, sometimes absurd but always meaningful. The table of contents features a kaleidoscope of topics: Ordinary Nudes, Ransom, Flu, Brisket, Belly Button, Transients Welcome, and Pink Ocean.Expect to be jolted into an alternate reality in stories like “...

I saw Dybek read from this a few years ago and I enjoyed it enough to buy it, get it signed, and read about half of it. I just read the whole thing and I like some parts of it, but its decadence is not as appealing to me now as it might have been then. The undercurrent of drunk horniness that suffuses this book is well-written, but is not as relevant to me at this point in my life as it has been in others (alas!). It’s clear that he gets a lot from Fitzgerald (even the title), and I think he’s a...

Start with your second best joke and end with your best. This one comes pretty close to that comedic mantra but sadly the ones in the middle don't fill your stomach. I found myself more annoyed by the bad shorts than amused by the good ones.

A great collection of flash fiction, full of the bizarre, touching and impactful stories that Dybek always provides.

Mostly solid, often good, sometimes great.