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The Coast of Chicago: Stories

4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 · rating details · 977 ratings · 121 reviews

The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek’s classic story collection. A child’s collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder’s inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss....more

Paperback, 192 pages

Published April 3rd 2004 by Picador (first published 1990)

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May 27, 2007 Paul Sebik rated it 4 of 5 stars

Most of these stories have a narrator looking back to the time of the story from an undisclosed or unimportant future vantage point. The way the character looks back indicates the story is vital memory(to the character's existence even). Dybek's vivid flashes of past come in layer upon layer, rendering the story into not just memory, but perhaps the most important time of these characters' lives. The sense of nostalgia is thick and alive--it's hypnotic at times, but slows the read a bit, too. Th...more

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Aug 08, 2012 Robert Palmer rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this short story collection when it was chosen for the " one book one Chicago " in 2004. I think the reason the story's resonated so much for me was that I know the neighborhoods,the streets and the people,which it so much easer reading than Dubliners by James Joyce.
The book really had me at the section titled "Nighthawks" a young man killing time at the art institute would always end his day viewing Edward Hoppers painting named Nighthawks.Dybek than brings the paint to life . The couple...more

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Dec 09, 2011 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Dybek is a wonderful writer. Many of the stories in this collection read like they are dreams being recalled. I imagine these stories with a fuzzy white frame around them. You know--the way a dream sequence is portrayed on a cheesy television sit-com. But Dybek’s stories are not cheesy. Although I would say that while some of their themes are mature, their presentation is pretty PG. Even the book’s cover illustration and text is hazy, suggesting dreaminess.

Actually, my TV comments may not be as...more Dybek is a wonderful writer. Many of the stories in this collection read like they are dreams being recalled. I imagine these stories with a fuzzy white frame around them. You know--the way a dream sequence is portrayed on a cheesy television sit-com. But Dybek’s stories are not cheesy. Although I would say that while some of their themes are mature, their presentation is pretty PG. Even the book’s cover illustration and text is hazy, suggesting dreaminess.

Actually, my TV comments may not be as random as I thought they were when I wrote them a second ago—Dybek’s stories are pretty visual. Characters are sketches; memories, while the setting is unifying and constant in the collection. Dybek allows us to access mid-century working-class immigrant south-side Chicago. It’s the time when and place where many of my friends’ parents grew up—sons and daughters of Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Czechs, Irish. My dad, the son of an immigrant and a Chicago northsider, was born in ’46; Dybek was born in ’42. So I have a frame of reference. Dybek fills this frame of scattered tales I’ve heard from others with a color and texture.

The title of another book by Dybek is “Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.” It’s a marvelous title, and a pretty good way of describing his approach to the stories in “The Coast of Chicago.” He visits childhood as one would visit the old neighborhood. Things are a little different each time you go back. You change, and the place changes. He captures the south side well, describing its apartments and taverns, its train viaducts and its bridges that cross the canal and river.

As much as I love his portrayals of his south-side home, I also loved the stories involving other neighborhoods. “Farwell,” named after the north-side street, is one of great descriptions of Chicago winter in the collection, taking place at the home of a professor near Loyola on the lake. And there’s a great scene in another story in which the narrator takes the El train north for the first time to visit a girl he met, not realizing how far away it is and how long the ride is. But perhaps my favorite story is “Chopin in Winter,” a melancholy tale about the families living in the narrator’s building, and the neighbor girl’s piano-playing:

“‘She’s playing her way through the waltzes,’ Dzia-Dzia told me, speaking as usual in his low, raspy voice as if we were having a confidential discussion. ‘She’s young but already knows Chopin’s secret—a waltz can tell more about the soul than a hymn’” (21).(less)

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Jun 08, 2012 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

In this 1981 collection by Chicago native Stuart Dybek, the reader meets a cast of characters who are able to find the sacred in their blighted Southside landscape. The opening story tells of a taciturn grandfather who finally begins to speak to his adolescent grandson because of the upstairs neighbor's renditions of Chopin. Though Chopin is not conjured again after this piece, the young pregnant neighbor's piano strokes remain present in ghost form throughout the rest of the collection. Sleepwa...more

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Jun 26, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This collection of short stories affirms that Dybek is a more than worthy recipient of the genius grant he was awarded several years ago. While, as in any story collection, certain selections resonated more, the fact that they were all written in the first-person made for a more linear reader experience. I was also quite drawn to the way the stories themselves appeared -- longer selections punctuated by short vignettes that draw thematically on the extended story that comes after. Likewise, that...more

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Feb 26, 2011 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories even though I'm not sure that I understand a few of the endings since Dybek writes poetically. My favorite is Lights because I had totally forgotten about this childhood activity..."Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!" Makes me smile every time I think about it. I also like the lines from Strays..."I never give any of them names. We don't know an animal's name. A name's what we use instead of smelling." Have no fear...I'll continue to name my pets...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you ever wanted to take a time capsule and go back in time to the Chicago South Side during the 60's and 70's, than this book will take you there. Dybek beautifully describes the lonliness and sadness of the back alleys of a working class neighborhood. I lived in the South Side, definitely during a different time, but he captured a feeling that I had while living there. You see fragments from that era on the street corners, and mixed in with the new culture that's taken over the South Side. I...more

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Sep 20, 2009 Simon A. Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: chicago, short-fiction

I finally read this one. I know a lot of Chicago writers point to this as the definitive collection of stories about Chicago and the vibrant characters that inhabit it. I liked it. I really did, but i didn't love it like I wanted to. The thing that kept me from truly loving it was that while Dybek is a very lyrical, poetic writer, his stories sometimes lack focus and momentum. Many of his stories are ABOUT characters and ABOUT places and ABOUT tragedies without actually diving full-in and allowi...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Matthew rated it 1 of 5 stars

Those were the days when the Belsen Street Pollacks came down the stairwells with their pockets filled with broken glass, an old Jew shouting out of the window, little Skip Kowalcyk reaching up to grab his fill of undergarments from the laundry lines - old Trouthead Mulvaney was on the mound for the Cubs, the smell of simmering beef heart and boiled tar in the air, Mayor Daley tapping the ash from his cigar as he rode by in his grand Buick, like some kind of pristine ocean liner, outfitted in br...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Ivan Labayne rated it 4 of 5 stars

So I won’t keep myself from doing this, even only for my stubbornness against the Formalist school, trumpeting organic unity, problematizing it even prior to the potential readings: for what I have went through in the earliest of February 25, 2012 include almost the first half of Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago and consummating the threshold pronouncing that I am ¾ through Saramago’s Blindness.

For Dybek, which I happened to own only two days ago, and who is being compared to Hemingway and Jo...more

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Apr 18, 2010 Krys rated it 4 of 5 stars

I feel like this collection reads like an MFA program's guide to "What a story should read like." But try as hard as I can to be disenchanted with its playing by the rules, I am victim to the values and payoffs I have been trained to appreciate.

Few stories in this set didn't work for me. And even the otherwise throwaway short-shorts placed in between more substantial stories become pallet cleansers before the next meaty bite. Standouts longer stories include the at times lyrical "Nighthawks," th...more

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Jul 31, 2009 Zinta rated it 5 of 5 stars

I’ve experienced that rare pleasure of hearing Stuart Dybek read his work—in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he is a sometime adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, and so sometimes, not at all often, has read to a large and hungry Kalamazoo audience, myself among them. That was poetry. Good stuff. Really good stuff. And so picking up this collection of stories about my favorite city, Chicago, and Dybek’s hometown, too, I knew I would be in for a street wise treat. Oh yeah.

Fourteen storie...more I’ve experienced that rare pleasure of hearing Stuart Dybek read his work—in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he is a sometime adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, and so sometimes, not at all often, has read to a large and hungry Kalamazoo audience, myself among them. That was poetry. Good stuff. Really good stuff. And so picking up this collection of stories about my favorite city, Chicago, and Dybek’s hometown, too, I knew I would be in for a street wise treat. Oh yeah.

Fourteen stories, and if you know anything about Dybek at all, you will know he is surrounded by awards and an otherwise impressive publishing history, so no need to go there. He’s proven goods. I’ll offer simply my personal perspective and experience on reading this collection. And so, indeed, it resonated with me. Dybek, like me, comes from a richly ethnic background. In his case, he is a second-generation Polish-American, growing up in Chicago neighborhoods, southern side of that great city. Whereas I have a father who is a visual artist, so influencing me to be visual in my own writing, Dybek’s second art love is music—jazz, specifically—and so for him, that second art comes through in obvious and less obvious ways. Here, too. Quite a few of these stories intertwine music. Music becomes something of a character itself (“Chopin in Winter”), or else it serves as background, or it is fabric of the words, adding a jazzy rhythm to his sentence structure, a bop and a bounce to his choice of expression. Nice.

The collection is an interesting mix of traditional sandwiched with flash fiction. The flash pieces reminded me of Dybek’s poetry. Poetry in prose, nearly. Because Dybek’s style (see note above on musical influence) is very lyrical. There’s something improvisational about his writing, yet carefully so. A great jazz artist doesn’t really improvise at all; he or she dips into that vastness of musical experience and freely lifts from it and into light. What is surprise to others is old blood to the maestro.

“A kiss crosses the city. It rides a glass streetcar that showers blue, electric sparks along the ghost of a track—a track paved over in childhood—the line that she and her mother used to take downtown.

“A kiss crosses the city, revolves through a lobby door into a rainy night, catches a cab along a boulevard of black glass, and, running red lights, dissolves behind the open fans of wiper blades.

“Rain spirals colorlessly out of the dark, darkens all it touches and makes it gleam.

“Her kiss crosses the city, enters a subway tunnel that descends at this deserted hour like a channel through an underground world. It’s timeless there, always night, as if the planet doesn’t turn below the street. At the mouth of the station stands a kid who’s gone AWOL and now has nowhere to go, a young conga drummer, a congacero, wearing a fatigue jacket and beating his drum. He has the pigeons up past their bedtime doing the mambo.” (page 105)

These are stories that put you into the unprettified ethnic neighborhoods that were, are, Chicago. The smells are here, the tastes, the mix of languages, the music, the blend of humanity. Here the city kids and the first generation immigrants, the junkies and winos and ex-cons and their corrupt cops. Here, too, are stories about nothing, just the sense of being there, and so, stories about everything you need to know to share the experience.

Dybek is a master of language, whatever medium he chooses—poetry or prose. He blends his arts, as all art should be a blend, all from the same fountainhead. He is visual artist, too, with one paint stroke:

“The blue, absorbing shadow would deepen to azure, and a fiery orange sun would dip behind the glittering buildings. The crowded beach would gradually empty, and a pitted moon would hover over sand scalloped with a million footprints. It would be time to go.” (page 45)

Just don’t go before acquainting yourself fully with the work of Stuart Dybek, and this collection is an excellent starting point.

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Sep 13, 2008 Krok Zero rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fall-2008

I hope Stuart Dybek writes a novel someday.

These stories are pretty good—good enough that I inhaled the whole book on a rainy Saturday—but I feel like Dybek's razor-sharp sense of place and elegant facility with everyday language would be better suited to the novel form. Like so many talented short story writers, Dybek is full of good ideas that never really coalesce into a satisfying whole. I submit that this is a flaw of the medium. It's possible to do wonderful things with the short story for...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

I picked this up because I had vague recollections of an old boyfriend reading Hot Ice and Pet Milk to me around '91, and wondered if they'd have the same impact on me eighteen years later. I really liked the stories Farwell and Chopin in Winter, then completely lost patience with Bijou and Nighthawks (which I found forced and arrogant) and thought the comparisons to Algren and Bellow were grossly exaggerated. I'm so glad I forged on though, as Hot Ice and Pet Milk are indeed the incredible stor...more

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Dec 13, 2011 Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars

I almost never read short story collections, regrettably. I only sought out this one because I heard a Dybek story read in a podcast and was so taken by it that I wanted to seek out more of his writing. I'm so glad I did. Being a Chicago native may have contributed to my enjoyment of these stories, but that was just a tiny part of it. He writes with such beautiful style, I was just sucked in. I loved the really brief one about visiting the professor on a snowy night, and especially loved the lon...more

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Feb 04, 2008 Patrick Brown rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good collection, maybe even great, but ultimately not quite as good as his more recent I Sailed with Magellan. "Pet Milk," "Hot Ice," and "Blight" are all terrific stories, especially "Pet Milk," which is so fucking achingly beautiful that I can hardly stand it. I had some trouble with the interminable "Nighthawks," a story that seemed gimmicky, something Dybek's stories rarely are. I have to confess that I don't really like stories where none of the characters have names, where they all seem...more

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May 09, 2007 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: chicago, memoir, anthology

One of several anthologies of short fiction by this author that I have read. Dybek blurs the line between fantasy and fact in his quasi-memoirs about growing up in Chicago in the Pilsen / Little Village area of the South Side in the 1960s. This time period was when white flight and deindustrialization were beginning to afflict Chicago and this part of town was in the middle of its transition from a predominantly Polish Catholic neighborhood to a predominantly Mexican Catholic neighborhood.

Some o...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Robb Todd added it

Shelves: 2012, short-stories, mind-explosion

One of the best books I have read in a long time. My first by Dybek. This collection is a perfect blend of language, narrative and character while also giving a sense of the world as it was in a certain place and time. Time travel. I tend to distance myself from writing that wants to report history and names and places while force-feeding me narrative and character but this pulled it off spectacularly. Perhaps because of the attention to language and knowing what not to say. I will read this boo...more

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Oct 01, 2010 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: chicago, short-stories

Wonderful stories, part gritty urban realism, part myth and dreamscape. My favorites in this collection: "Blight," a meditation on namelessness, music, going back to your childhood neighborhood, and what it means to "dig beauty"; "Pet Milk," which starts with condensed milk swirling in a cup of coffee and clouds swirling in a stormy sky; and "Nighthawks," a fantasia on Edward Hopper's painting of the same title.

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Oct 18, 2011 Andrea rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-story-collections

"The Coast of Chicago" is a lyrical short story collection about growing up in Chicago in the 50's and 60's--the poverty, the wild aimlessness of boyhood, those who escape the neighborhood and those who don't. Each longer piece is followed by a short-short, which was a fun pattern. Dybek adeptly captures the mood of the city, especially at night and in the winters. My favorite story in this collection is the simply gorgeous "Chopin in Winter," which is about a boy and his grandpa who fervently l...more

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Feb 13, 2009 Bradley Bergquist rated it 4 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed these short stories compiled into book format of a boy growing up on the southside of Chicago in Douglas Park. Dybek does a fine job of relating his story in terms that are universal, that stretch further than Chicago; but to any great city, with its ups and downs, and glorified gentrification. Interesting, and engaging read, would definitely recommend this to a friend.

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Mar 16, 2011 Alison marked it as to-read

Have always wanted to read more by Dybek, ever since reading one great short story by him when I was in college. Also, friends of mine got to have dinner with him and were apparently allowed to call him "Stewie."

Prompted to add because of this article:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-an...

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Oct 26, 2008 Diana rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Diana by: Tracy Kidder

I borrowed The Coast of Chicago from the library, but I don't want to give it back. Because it's not a book that you just read through and return to the library. Dybek's stories endure like poems to be read over and over again. I did this with many of these pieces. I'd get to the end and go right back to the beginning to relive the beauty. I don't know why his stories are so perfect. Like an album that's just right on, there's a mystery there. At first I wanted to articulate why I was taken by h...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Giacomo Casanova rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've only read the short story of Pet Milk from this book, so my rating only pertains to that story. Let me say that I don't even have the words to describe that beautiful story. Pet Milk is one of those stories that changed me forever. It is without a doubt, and in a weird way, the most romantic and sad story ever. Talk about nostalgia!

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Jul 26, 2009 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it 4 of 5 stars

A book I would never, ever have found on my own; thanks, Jan. Reading it on the plane ride home after a stay in Chicago made the words resonate for me, so much so that I've decided to send it as a surprise to a friend who loves beautiful words and who is headed to Chicago at the first of June.

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Feb 04, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: must-reread

I read this a few years ago, and now don't remember most of the stories. "Pet Milk," though, is in my top five of favorite short stories of all time. I should reread the rest of this, and more of his other stuff, sometime.... Dybeck was partly responsible for the time I came close to moving away from New York to go to school in Chicago, and he is is not at all responsible for the fact that I finally didn't.

If you've never read "Pet Milk," you should. I can see how maybe not everyone would think...more

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May 27, 2012 Marcella rated it 4 of 5 stars

This really is the Dubliners for Chicago in the 60's - 70's. Reading this was like listening to my dad tell stories of his youth in Back of the Yards (though this isn't set in Back of the Yards - you could practically interchange it).

While all the stories are good, some of the best are:
* Chopin in Winter
* Blight
* Hot Ice
* Pet Milk

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Mar 29, 2009 Melody rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Melody by: Kelly

Smoky, atmospheric short and short-short stories. Pet Milk is a standout, while some of the short-shorts left me cold. Dybek has a singular voice, that isn't exactly haunting but is... well, muscular. Overwhelmingly male but not in a swaggering way.

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Dec 01, 2008 Selena rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: teachers maybe? People looking for a quick read

A great book of short stories involving Chicago neighborhoods. It reads like something I would have read in "Great Books" in grade school. I think that was the name of the advanced reading group. Anyway, this collection is great although reminiscent of something that would have (should have?) been assigned as reading in high school, at the very least.

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Dec 13, 2012 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Exquisite short stories redolent with delicious imagery. Like eating a well-paced multi-course gourmet meal--bucolically sated but hungry for more. Dybek ranks now as a favorite. I could wrap my arms around him in gratitude for his generosity.

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About Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek has published three short story collections: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed With Magellan; and two volumes of poetry: Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. He has been anthologized frequently and regularly appears in magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine and the Paris Review.

He has received numerous awards, incl...more

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Quotes from The Coast of Chicago: ...

“Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.” — 31 people liked it

“Love, it’s such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb.” — 4 people liked it

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