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Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories
In Stuart Dybek's Chicago, wonder lurks in unexpected places—in garbage-strewn alleys, gloomy basement apartments, abandoned rooms at the top of rickety stairs periodically rumbled by passing el trains. Transformed through the wide eyes of Dybek's adolescent heroes, these grimy urban backwaters become exotic landscapes of fear-filled possibility, of dreams not yet turned to nightmares. Chronicling what happens when Old World faith meets the dark side of the American dream, Dybek's poignant stories of coming of age in Chicago alternately appall, amaze, and just simply entertain.
212 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Stuart Dybek
65 books216 followersStuart 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, including: a 1998 Lannan Award; the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story"; an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship; two fellowships from the NEA; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center; and a Whiting Writers Award. He has also received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story, "Hot Ice." Dybek's story, "Blight," was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature.
Dybek grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Polish-American neighborhood called Pilsen or Little Village, which is also the main setting for his fiction. He received an M.A. in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Western Michigan University when he is not in Chicago.
He has received numerous awards, including: a 1998 Lannan Award; the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story"; an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship; two fellowships from the NEA; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center; and a Whiting Writers Award. He has also received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story, "Hot Ice." Dybek's story, "Blight," was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature.
Dybek grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Polish-American neighborhood called Pilsen or Little Village, which is also the main setting for his fiction. He received an M.A. in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Western Michigan University when he is not in Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
January 1, 2025
Beyond the stories, the encompassing title of Stuart Dybek's early work of short fiction seems most appropriate. Childhood and Other Stories represents Dybek's personal coming of age in a working class area of Chicago, as well as his debut as an author.
The stories represent fragments of lives & are well-told, with some much more polished than others. There is "The Palatski Man" as a brother & sister explore the fringes of their very Polish-Catholic neighborhood, a shared adventure while reaching beyond the familiar.
"Duck Blood Soup" involves a search for Czarnina for a sick grandmother, soup composed in part of blood from a duck & not readily available. Meanwhile, "Neighborhood Drunk" portrays the life of an erratic, aging alcoholic who does odd jobs at a local bowling alley.
These are tales of people whose identity is tied to their ethnicity and the Roman-Catholic Church, folks both confined & defined by their neighborhood & the spire of their local church. It is a time long before cell phones or the Internet, when kids met at the soda fountain of a nearby drugstore. However, some do attempt to reach beyond the boundaries that restrict them.
This is the case with a character named Jill in "The Wake", someone who had "disciplined her life, held herself aloof throughout high school, while feeling trapped & in need of a new vision of herself". When she flees the suffocating nature of the funeral parlor, she is taunted by Spanish kids just beyond her own neighborhood as she heads home. She is picked up by a fellow in a Pontiac & while riding around the neighborhood, senses that...
Here is an example of Dybek's colorful, descriptive language:
*Within my review are 2 images of Stuart Dybek & a Polish-Catholic church in the author's old Chicago neighborhood. **I had the good fortune to take part in a book discussion of Childhood & Other Neighborhoods with the author present.
The stories represent fragments of lives & are well-told, with some much more polished than others. There is "The Palatski Man" as a brother & sister explore the fringes of their very Polish-Catholic neighborhood, a shared adventure while reaching beyond the familiar.
"Duck Blood Soup" involves a search for Czarnina for a sick grandmother, soup composed in part of blood from a duck & not readily available. Meanwhile, "Neighborhood Drunk" portrays the life of an erratic, aging alcoholic who does odd jobs at a local bowling alley.
These are tales of people whose identity is tied to their ethnicity and the Roman-Catholic Church, folks both confined & defined by their neighborhood & the spire of their local church. It is a time long before cell phones or the Internet, when kids met at the soda fountain of a nearby drugstore. However, some do attempt to reach beyond the boundaries that restrict them.
This is the case with a character named Jill in "The Wake", someone who had "disciplined her life, held herself aloof throughout high school, while feeling trapped & in need of a new vision of herself". When she flees the suffocating nature of the funeral parlor, she is taunted by Spanish kids just beyond her own neighborhood as she heads home. She is picked up by a fellow in a Pontiac & while riding around the neighborhood, senses that...
It was only your own death that shows how life should be lived, as she listened to music from the car radio, the electric guitar reaching for the upper registers, a song about an angel. With the radio playing, everything seems all right. That's how I'd like to die--listening to music high, driving around at night, as her house went by again & again.The city is gritty and the distance between individual ethnic neighborhoods at times formidable, separated by language, culture & their own lack of sensitivity to what lies next to their respective area boundaries, sometimes in flux, with each one thrusting for the golden ring seemingly just beyond, or just idly groveling in time & space.
Here is an example of Dybek's colorful, descriptive language:
Noon patinaed the downtown skyscrapers. Smokestacks fumed among copper green church steeples & an enldess assortment of water towers. Overhead, an airliner droned and he wondered if anyone could see him--a boy on a bridge with a white sack blowing like a pennant.Most of Dybek's tales are exceedingly evocative, painting coming-of-age images of youthful souls caught in a blue-collar, Midwestern reality, tempered by a dreamworld, laced with a dose of the macabre. I very much look forward to reading Stuart Dybek's later stories, including The Coast of Chicago.
His life spread out before him like the cityscape, suspended in time, rather than the dark blur of the highways. This was a landscape he was the center of, completely alone, though surrounded by a city. The dreams were over. Between them was a distance greater than between foreign countries.
*Within my review are 2 images of Stuart Dybek & a Polish-Catholic church in the author's old Chicago neighborhood. **I had the good fortune to take part in a book discussion of Childhood & Other Neighborhoods with the author present.
June 7, 2020
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 brilliance.
From the precise, it would be reasonable to expect dark and depressing reading, but Dybek writes with a stark realism blended with a curiously appealing playfulness; the darker he pluges the more vivid the images he conjures, and the more compelling the prose. Comparisons to Saul Bellow, Ginsberg or Dylan are not out of place. Some of stories have a quality to them that reminds me of Goya's Black Paintings, prints of several I have around the house.
In my favourite, Horror Movie, 12 year old Calvin arrives home to blood all over the bathroom, and his mother missing. The old Puerto Rican lady upstairs tells him not to worry, but once alone, he is terrified by nightmares. The next day he sneaks into a movie theatre where he sees a surreal horror film and the old toothless usher offers to give him a gum job. On leaving the cinema it is like the neighbourhood has changed, he sees monsters, and the true squalidity of what’s around him. Its 'coming of age' writing as good as I can remember reading.
These are a set of stories that cover the spectrum of adolescent experiences, emotions and epiphanies, they are at times hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always moving and compassionate.
A couple of quotations. From Neighborhood Drunk...
and, from Sauerkraut Soup..
It’s available on OpenLibrary if it’s a struggle to find it at a reasonable price.
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 brilliance.
From the precise, it would be reasonable to expect dark and depressing reading, but Dybek writes with a stark realism blended with a curiously appealing playfulness; the darker he pluges the more vivid the images he conjures, and the more compelling the prose. Comparisons to Saul Bellow, Ginsberg or Dylan are not out of place. Some of stories have a quality to them that reminds me of Goya's Black Paintings, prints of several I have around the house.
In my favourite, Horror Movie, 12 year old Calvin arrives home to blood all over the bathroom, and his mother missing. The old Puerto Rican lady upstairs tells him not to worry, but once alone, he is terrified by nightmares. The next day he sneaks into a movie theatre where he sees a surreal horror film and the old toothless usher offers to give him a gum job. On leaving the cinema it is like the neighbourhood has changed, he sees monsters, and the true squalidity of what’s around him. Its 'coming of age' writing as good as I can remember reading.
These are a set of stories that cover the spectrum of adolescent experiences, emotions and epiphanies, they are at times hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always moving and compassionate.
A couple of quotations. From Neighborhood Drunk...
The summer we were fifteen, Dan discovered an old suitcase of his father’s liqueur miniatures. The suitcase had been on the back porch for years and it was like coming on a hidden treasure chest. They looked like jewels, exquisite shapes of glass glowing ruby, Amber, creme-de-menthe emerald.
We’d sneak back there on June evenings with the light out in the kitchen and Dan’s parents in the front of the apartment watching TV. I had a penlight and we’d study the labels before sampling. It brought the world into our lives as no geography book ever could. From necks narrower than a straw drops of exotic places burned on our tongues: Cognac, Chartreuse, Curaçao.
and, from Sauerkraut Soup..
In high school the priests had cautioned us against the danger of books.
“The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it already is, Marzek”.
I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so that I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education-The Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you, (2) study what they condemn .
It’s available on OpenLibrary if it’s a struggle to find it at a reasonable price.
April 11, 2019
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.
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.
April 16, 2009
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 profoundly urban, with nary a Yuppie in sight: crumbling, rusty, industrial. I'm particularly fond of Dybek's palette of artificial lighting colors - the "mint blue" of a bowling alley for example. And his characters are as memorable as the scenes he places them in. The Palatski Man: "He reappeared in spring, some Sunday morning, perhaps Easter, when the twigs of the catalpa trees budded and lawns smelled of mud..." (palatski is some kind of eastern European sweet, but I've Googled in vain to determine if it really existed.)
October 18, 2018
[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 first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history.
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history.
December 21, 2014
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. "Visions of Budhardin" is almost certainly going in my fiction workshop: a psychedelic tale in which a man in an elephant suit trashes a church and is chased out of town.
I will read it again. The run of stories at the heart of this collection, from "Neighborhood Drunk" to "Charity" was a delight. I kept anticipating a stinker--never came.
I will read it again. The run of stories at the heart of this collection, from "Neighborhood Drunk" to "Charity" was a delight. I kept anticipating a stinker--never came.
September 30, 2014
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 them. He's at NW now, back in Chicago, near the Pilsen he has written about all his life. About this collection: amazing. A mix of sweetness, gritty realism, deft observation, and some Polish Catholicism/mysticism... Growing up in Pilsen stories.
June 17, 2013
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 of this collection is Dybek's skill for depicting children and teens coming to terms with the adult world. He captures these experiences with an aching honesty, which is both beautiful and painful to read. My favorite story from the collection and example of this is "Blood Soup."
One of the most inspirational aspects of this collection is Dybek's skill for depicting children and teens coming to terms with the adult world. He captures these experiences with an aching honesty, which is both beautiful and painful to read. My favorite story from the collection and example of this is "Blood Soup."
June 21, 2015
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 in the middle of a city. So I sort of started growing up as a writer and a reader with this collection. It's vivid, and stays with you for a long time, no matter the circumstances.
August 15, 2014
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 to pick up lightly.
January 1, 2024
I read this because Thomas Disch put it on his list of “13 Great Works of Fantasy Published in the Last 13 Years”, in Twilight Zone Magazine, July/August 1983. Calling this fantasy is stretching it a little bit, even for the two stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I really liked the first one, “The Palatski Man”, about two children who discover a secret society of street vendors and ragmen with their own religion; and at least I could tell what “Charity” was about. “Blood Soup” was touching, about the lengths two boys are willing to go to try and help their grandma, but it turned bleak and seemingly nihilistic.
“Visions of Budhardin” was one of the strangest, and perhaps the hardest to read. One review describes it thus: “[T]he protagonist, in a rage of pent up resentment, ravages the church which so callously ignored his childhood needs.” Another summarizes it like this: “[A] homosexual outcast returns inside a huge mechanical elephant, and vents his wrath on the local Catholic church whose years of moral lies have made his inner landscape a ruin.” Ouch. That’s a serious charge.
Polish Catholicism is vital to these stories, and it’s sad how the author is so hostile to it.
Another surreal story is “The Apprentice”, about an uncle and nephew (whom the uncle calls by at least five different names) who scavenge for roadkill. No idea what this story was about. That was my problem with most of them. Too deep for me.
But I’ll see if I can get him to show up at the Nelson Algren Birthday Party this year anyway. It’s a crime that he hasn’t been invited before. Every Chicago writer should be. Besides, he also wrote “Death of a Right Fielder”, another great story.
“Visions of Budhardin” was one of the strangest, and perhaps the hardest to read. One review describes it thus: “[T]he protagonist, in a rage of pent up resentment, ravages the church which so callously ignored his childhood needs.” Another summarizes it like this: “[A] homosexual outcast returns inside a huge mechanical elephant, and vents his wrath on the local Catholic church whose years of moral lies have made his inner landscape a ruin.” Ouch. That’s a serious charge.
Polish Catholicism is vital to these stories, and it’s sad how the author is so hostile to it.
Another surreal story is “The Apprentice”, about an uncle and nephew (whom the uncle calls by at least five different names) who scavenge for roadkill. No idea what this story was about. That was my problem with most of them. Too deep for me.
But I’ll see if I can get him to show up at the Nelson Algren Birthday Party this year anyway. It’s a crime that he hasn’t been invited before. Every Chicago writer should be. Besides, he also wrote “Death of a Right Fielder”, another great story.
August 11, 2011
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 of them are pretty realist (with the exception of "Visions of Budhardin," which is a little too weird to be plausible). A few of the stories dip into fantasy (often right at the end), but most remain in the natural world. The NYT review on the back cover says, "Dybek . . . bends his flair for naturalism on the anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent with the logic of childhood." Yeah, more or less. Mostly less. He is pretty good at rendering the worlds of his characters, though. And his psychological insight is astute. All in all, this is a great collection with some wonderful storytelling.
February 8, 2008
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 working-class and impoverished neighborhoods is impressive, inexhaustible. Even the holy water in the parish church is in keeping with the setting: "It was salty and stale from a thousand fingertips, with some kind of fungus floating at the bottom as in a dirty fishbowl."
These are neighborhoods that I will definitely revisit, though they haven't been cleaned up for tourists.
Dybek's mastery of gritty imagery--smells, sights, sounds, textures--of working-class and impoverished neighborhoods is impressive, inexhaustible. Even the holy water in the parish church is in keeping with the setting: "It was salty and stale from a thousand fingertips, with some kind of fungus floating at the bottom as in a dirty fishbowl."
These are neighborhoods that I will definitely revisit, though they haven't been cleaned up for tourists.
June 12, 2008
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.
August 29, 2008
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.
February 11, 2018
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.
January 20, 2021
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.
September 16, 2023
Chopin in winter by Stuart Dybek — Review
“Chopin in winter” by Stuart Dybek is the story about a young boy who is listening to the Etudes of Chopin during a Chicago winter season. The main characters are a pregnant neighbor, grandfather and other members of the boy's family.
Stuart Dybek describes the bizarre routine of everyday life in Chicago's Polish enclaves. The story has close connotations with the memories of the author about his childhood.
Here is the link to the text of the story:
https://royallib.com/read/Dybek_Stuar...
“Chopin in winter” by Stuart Dybek is the story about a young boy who is listening to the Etudes of Chopin during a Chicago winter season. The main characters are a pregnant neighbor, grandfather and other members of the boy's family.
Stuart Dybek describes the bizarre routine of everyday life in Chicago's Polish enclaves. The story has close connotations with the memories of the author about his childhood.
Here is the link to the text of the story:
https://royallib.com/read/Dybek_Stuar...
February 9, 2021
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.
July 22, 2023
Intriguing collection of stories of the down-and-out, wrong-side-of-the -tracks, immigrant poor of Chicago. Eerie, haunting, filled with danger, and grotesquerie - mostly narrated by young teens - a fascinating read, disquieting and unusual.
March 11, 2023
Meh. Well-written but I didn't particularly like any of the stories.
February 14, 2025
really interesting collection of stories, some i loved (notably 'the long thoughts' and 'the charity') and lots confused me. i did enjoy it though
April 2, 2025
Really weird stories with meaning.
May 11, 2025
Great throughout but the last story, The Apprentice, is an otherworldly magic
November 24, 2025
'The Palatski Man' had something I liked, unlike most of the others.
February 10, 2009
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 setting of Chicago's underbelly, feels somehow both fresh and oddly timeless.
***
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 setting of Chicago's underbelly, feels somehow both fresh and oddly timeless.
May 2, 2009
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. :)
July 15, 2010
I've read Coast of Chicago and I really liked it, but this collection didn't do as much for me. There a couple great stories, but a few drift a little too far into the surreal/absurd for my personal tastes. But, having said that, he's still one of the best short story writers in the business and I'm looking forward to reading I Sailed with Magellan.
May 9, 2007
If you are curious about this one, check out what I had to say about Dybek's other book, The Coast of Chicago. I don't really write about individual stories but I can't really remember which ones were in which book in any case.
July 5, 2007
gorgeous stories, gorgeous imagery, low plot - when you're dealing with kids' world, it's easy to get by on low plot since everything is steeped in attention and meaning. lush characters, strong & believable voice-- it's incredible this was dybek's first collection.
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