I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

Following his renowned The Coast of Chicago and Childhood, story writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the story of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hitmen, mothers and factory workers, boys turned men and men turned to urban myth. I Sailed With Magellan solidifies Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, American, The United States Of America, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2003

About the author

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, 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.

Reviews

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

“Mick y yo diferíamos sobre quién de los dos recordaba mejor el pasado…
[…]
- Eso no pasó, - insistía yo. - Siempre lo pintas más dramático de lo que fue.
Mick me miraba meneaba la cabeza con condescendencia y me despachaba como Señor, un gesto desdeñoso con la mano al que nuestro padre recurría siempre que alguien intentaba estafarle.
-¿Por casualidad te suena el término recuerdo reprimido?, - preguntaba Mick.
- Lo tuyo no son recuerdos. Lo tuyo son vasos de agua medio vacíos y sueños.
- ¿No crees que soñar sea una manera de recordar? Y, si fuera así, ¿por qué un recuerdo no sería una especie de sueño?"


Es cierto que la memoria funciona a ráfagas (como los sueños), un objeto, una persona, un lugar, una frase del pasado, pueden haberse convertido al cabo de los años, de décadas quizás en algo diferente en nuestro recuerdo porque puede que este objeto, esta persona, este lugar o esta frase en algún momento de nuestra vida se desviara y adquiriera otro significado distorsionado y reelaborado según nuestra conveniencia. “Quién sabe por qué la memoria o los sueños rescatan objetos sencillos, una bici, una rebeca, un trineo, y los convierten en emblemas de la infancia. Será porque la infancia, ese universo alternativo que se expande en el olvido, la creación está compuesta de recuerdo, no de materia.” Al igual que esta memoria está fragmentada, no es la lineal porque nos viene en forma de flashes, y al recordar ciertos hechos, puede que idealizados, o exagerados con un punto de nostalgia, al final lo que de verdad importa es como lo sintamos, como lo seguimos viviendo en nuestra memoria después de todos estos años, o cómo nos llegan estos recuerdos en forma de emociones. Camille Estrada, un personaje secundario maravilloso en esta novela repleta de rincones dónde escarbar, llegado un momento le dice a Perry Katzek, el narrador, sobre su escritura: “- Yo nunca hago por inventar nada, - dijo Camille. - Ocurre sin más. De todos modos lo importante no es inventarlo, sino sentirlo.” Y es justo así tal como lo describe Camille, es sentirlo vivo después de no-sé-cuánto-tiempo lo que de verdad importa, y Stuart Dybek lo plasma tan bien a la hora de darle vida, porque estos recuerdos pueden ser más o menos fieles, más o menos veraces pero esta narración que proviene del pasado de Perry entre los años 50 y 60 en un Chicago que se despliega frente a nosotros, no deja de ser eso: el sentir de la vida desplegándose a tu paso. Mientras Perry observa su presente convierte su vida en un largo recuerdo del pasado: personajes, diferentes lenguas, sonidos, lugares de una ciudad en plena ebullición surgen a la vida frente a nosotros.


“No creo que se pueda culpar a nadie por lo que escribe, como tampoco por lo que sueña. Nadie tiene que confesar lo que sueña. ¿No creees?"


"Yo navegué con Magallanes" sí que es una novela, pero no deja de ser una serie de relatos con lugares y personajes interconectados, con el lazo en común de Perry y su familia como protagonistas absolutos, o como portavoces de esta comunidad de Chicago aunque es Perry, el narrador adolescente el verdadero transmisor de esta vida y experiencias que van surgiendo como una cascada interminable. La infancia, adolescencia y parte de la juventud del hijo de unos emigrantes polacos, Perry Katzek, sirve como nexo para que Dybek nos lance a las calles de Chicago y respiremos la vida como si estuviésemos físicamente situados entre esos años 50 y 60 dentro de esta espiral de momentos inolvidables. Ya tuve esa sensación en La costa de Chicago, y aquí lo he vuelto a sentir, la sonoridad que es capaz de transmitir la prosa de Dybek, y tanta es la fuerza de su narrativa que prácticamente la música, los ruidos de las calles, las voces funcionan casi como una herramienta interactiva que engullen al lector.


"Su última carta terminaba así:
A veces leo qué tiempo hará en tu ciudad para poder imaginarte al despertar, viviendo tu vida sin mí."


El tema de la identidad, de la pertenencia a un lugar es algo que Stuart Dybek está aquí continuamente reiterando en forma de unos personajes emigrados que se han agarrado a la ciudad de Chicago como si fuera el baluarte de una fortaleza. Esa pertenencia a un lugar convierte a la ciudad de Chicago en un momento de continuo cambio, de recién llegados de diferentes lugares, yo diría, en la verdadera protagonista de esta novela. La ciudad como un símbolo de identidad de unos personajes como Perry y sus amigos, que si tienen este sentimiento de pertenencia pero que sin embargo, sus padres no tenían y que aquí plasma tan a flor de piel Dybek a la hora de describirnos por ejemplo el personaje del padre de Perry, que aunque convierte América en su país, ciertamente hay una cierta dualidad de no pertenecer a ningún lugar concreto. Son las dos Américas, la verdadera, cruda, a veces violenta y otras colorida, percibida por Perry, y la América todavía idealizada percibida por su padre. Admito que el retrato que me llega de su padre, por parte de Perry, me llegó al alma y me emociona porque me retrotrae a mi propia vida y vivencias, y que lo convierten para mí en el gran personaje de esta novela brillantísima y única en su retrato de la realidad cotidiana que es capaz de transmitir.


“Regresó, no la sensación en sí, sino el recuerdo de una antigua sensación de la infancia, para la que todavía no tengo nombre: una actitud protectora indescriptible hacia mi padre, el temor a, pese a su fe en el esfuerzo y en el espiritu práctico, su incapacidad para valorar cabalmente la realidad del país en el que viviamos. Compartíamos un hogar compartíamos una vida pero habitábamos dimensiones diferentes. Él residía en otra América, un lugar lejano como el Londres de Dickens o el Moscú de Gogol.”


La novela de Dybek está compuesto de once relatos interconectados que nos sumergen en un mundo de ilusiones ya pasadas, interrumpidas, soñadas, y que sin embargo, funcionan casi como una realidad en el presente. Dybek narra una época que ya pasó en la que sus personajes crecen, cambian, se hacen adultos, algunos mueren y sin embargo, la ciudad permanece, aunque también vaya mimetizándose a medida que sus personajes la vayan abandonando o vaciando. Yo navegué con Magallanes es una carta de amor de Dybek a una ciudad que da forma a sus personajes y los define. Y cada uno de sus personajes están llenos de vida, aquí no hay nada gratuito, todo tiene sentido a la hora de situar a sus personajes en una ciudad que los reafirma en su identidad.


“-Yo adoro los vínculos, la visión de conjunto de las novelas. Y tú… tú piensas que la vida es una colección de Grandes Momentos. Mira todos esos libritos raquíticos de poesía, dijo señalando la alfombra raída donde la máquina de escribir se alzaba sobre una pila de libros de la biblioteca.”

♫♫♫ Sweet Home Chicago - Robert Johnson ♫♫♫

[Sosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 month, I specifically wanted to finish one of the many books on my shelf that I'd abandoned. I tried to pick up Magellan right where I left off. I read about one page of "Wild Orchids" before I was intrigued enough that I knew I had to start over. By the time I was halfway through "Breasts", I already considered Magellan among my favorite books ever.

By stringing together twenty years of the life of a character who is obviously deeply personal to him, Dybek lays himself bare through Perry Katzek. Dybek lets us dream alongside Perry in the early years of life where anything is possible; and then thrusts him into the vastly eventful years of high school with its adventures and ambition, yet constant sexual frustration; and then beyond, to the acceptance of a disappointing "real" world.

Dybek's Polish ancestry and the city of Chicago are central to I Sailed With Magellan. Not only am I not familiar with Polish culture, but I haven't even been to Chicago. There were a TON of references to these two things that probably would have made the book even better for me. However, this never got in the way of understanding Magellan. Dybek is interested not in telling his life story through fiction, but in using his experiences and background to write about imagination at its most glorious, and disappointment at its most heartbreaking.

I'm tempted to write a review for each story in this book. "Breasts" is epic; I'd call it literary magic. It's that kind of story that is just as likely to annoy a reader as it is to blow them away. I would say the same about the whole book, but two other stories in particular were amazing to me. Dybek's wandering style is already a huge influence to me. When I start to daydream and wish I was a writer or film director (which is often), I think of creating something similar to what Dybek did with this book.

There are no bad stories in this collection. Great literature is subjective, of course, but I feel lucky to have found a book that I love so much; and I also feel kind of silly for not realizing it when I tried reading it before. I'd recommend I Sailed With Magellan to anybody who likes to read. And if they read it and don't like it, I will never speak to them again. Well, I guess that's a little severe. But I will seriously be really really mad at them and possibly never forgive them.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the murky area between short stories and a novel, Dybek’s narrative is a homage to his old Chicago neighbourhood with detail found in a documentary detail and flourish raconteur flourish of an experienced spinner of yarns.

Specifically, this is the Little Village community of the 1960s, narrated by something like a reincarnation of himself as a youngster, a boy called Perry, a teenager in all but the first couple of stories.

It’s a tough life for many, families use bed sheets for curtains, veterans drink interminably in seedy bars mourning friends that never came back from the war, and certainly not without danger..

..the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars.

It is all held together and made so entertaining by his characters, who express their individuality as they tell their own stories; Uncle Lefty by whom he is employed at the age of 10 to sing in various bars earning Lefty free drinks, his extrovert brother Mick, who, though two years younger, coaxes Perry into the beginnings of adolescent sexuality.

Two chapters are particularly memorable.
Breasts, a tightly plotted little nightmare depicting the fateful collisions of a mob hit man preoccupied with encountered and remembered images of old girlfriends, a stoical Little Village entrepreneur, and a cross-dressing retired pro-wrestler working as store security.
And the final chapter, which deals with the demise of Perry’s inspirational uncle.

Both would stand reading alone, and rank along with the greatest of all Dybek short stories, Cordoba, from the collection The Start of Something: The Selected Stories of Stuart Dybek, though available for free on the Electric Literature Website

It may defy classification, but its originality and spirit are undeniable.

[Keegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 prepared me for the deep and profound sadness that threads through this collection of stories (a novel in stories, some would call it, but those people would be idiots).

This collection is more about a place than a person, though a young Polish Chicagoan, Perry, does tend to be in most of the stories, or one of his family members. What these stories really give the reader is a taste of Chicago at a certain point in history. More than other authors who use Chicago as the backdrop for their narratives (see: The Time Traveler's Wife, which was terrible), Dybek gets a sense of what Chicago looks like to a native. There was more than just a parade of tourist locations; this took place in a neighborhood which was at one point filled with various European immigrants, but now has shifted. This shift, this cultural and ethnic shift, is present in the narrative as much as the change that takes place in the characters.

Chicago, for Dybek, exists now only in memory. And that, really, is the central point of the book: an exploration of the role of memory in narrative. Most stories have very little present-day action. For example, in the final story, Perry's brother Mick stands outside his old house, is asked one question several times, and then runs away (that's not really a spoiler). The action that is in the present of the narrative is very, very limited. Most of the story takes place as the narrator seamless drifts from present day observation to long recollection. Connections are made between how the current situation and what past events lead to it.

It would be easy to label this stream-of-consciousness writing and lump it in with Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but there is something more here. There is an overarching sadness at not only the events of the characters, but how the city remembers it's citizens. Throughout the course of the novel, the characters change quite a bit, both internally (their personalities and characterizations) as well as externally (where they live and what they do), but the city remains mostly static. Buildings seldom change purpose, and instead are left abandoned when emptied. Houses fall down and never reappear. It's a horribly sad reflection on how a city is merely a holding vessel for a constantly shifting mass of people who never stop to see it for what it is. In the same way that a glass will give shape to the water within, so to does Chicago give shape to the characters therein.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone. There is just one warning: don't approach it as if it were a short story collection. Approach it more like a novel about a city told in a varied, shifting perspective. But not, under any circumstance, a novel-in-stories.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Blue · Rating 4 out of 5]

strangely enough this took an obscene amount of time to finish but it was worth it methinks

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 bring this lost? world alive. linked short stories record the life and upbringing of perry katzek, from singing in the bars as a little tyke (for his uncle lefty's free shots, and his root beers) to trying to make some time with his best friend and potential lover down at the fire truck graveyard by the polluted and sick "river" (she did NOT like the ambiance) dybek is the real thing and you'll find yourself transported to his world he loves. even if if doesn't exist anymore, and maybe never really did.

[Manda · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 to Dybek, I know, because he writes of the time of my parents and grandparents, in those neighborhoods. Using Polish words I know for food and insults. Reading Dybek for me is like being a kid again, sitting underneath the table where "the Adults" played Pinochle or Rams, smoking, yelling for someone to bring another beer or grab the bottle of V.O. and telling stories. I can smell the butchers shops, the garlic and the sewer in his writing and in their voices.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 bits. And the two brothers were great characters.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 and dreams and hidden lives drive us mad; even if they kill us: even if they lead us on to countless other forms of destruction, Dybek shows us how they can still deepen our love for one other and for the beauty of our minuscule existence as it is lived in narrow alleyways, unclean waters, and a vast cosmos.

Dybek's stories are full of digressions that are as perfectly shaped as the finest cut pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each digression, its own right, is a tale worth savoring. Together, they contribute to the richly symphonic whole collection of stories. Thus, while rendering an extraordinarily particular (sometimes humorous, sometimes brutal) portrait of life in the Polish immigrant community in the 1950s and 1960s Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods of Chicago, Dybek gives the reader so much more than a warm and nuanced reminiscence of time and place: he gives us access to dreams, story structures, and histories that draw us beyond that place, time, and particular community, toward what can make us fully human.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 story where the heart is half-hidden in the untold. I liked that Perry's story includes his brother's, the way real people's growing does intertwine and contrast with the growth of those around them. I liked the elements of the unreal or quasi-mythic in the neighborhood, in the stories of the men who drink at Zip's. I like the way the young people are explicitly interested in understanding their lives as stories and writing their own identities.

[David Gallin-Parisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 vibrations. Comforting, poignant vibrations happen throughout. The stories depict growing up with memorable instances of midwest urban life, from third dates, throwing out all one's belongings, and visiting bars with relatives. All of the stories concern friendship and love at their core, told in a quick-moving and multi-emotional succession.

[Maple Street Book Shop · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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 matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.”

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars if that were possible. This book is worth the read if only for the last third alone.

[Ezra Sergent-Leventhal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright so Coast of Chicago is the one worth reading

[Zea · Rating 2 out of 5]

so so so not for me but i can understand why some people (men) love it. stuart dybek describe a woman without mention of her titties challenge

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 bit at the digressive style, which started to feel a bit formulaic.
Still though, despite this curiously negative set of impressions, I honestly think it's a lovely book, one I'd definitely recommend to pretty much anyone.

[Lucio · Rating 5 out of 5]

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...

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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, especially the story "Breasts," about a small time thug sent out to do a hit for a criminal organization. I didn't care for these stories, but I'm sure they do reflect the rough underbelly of 1950s and 1960s Chicago.

Suddenly, as I was struggling to get through these, I came upon my two favorites by far. "Lunch at the Loyola Arms" tells of how Perry returns to Chicago after his family moved to Memphis, and he is scraping by on barely any money. He tells of a girl he was involved with, Melody, who he calls Natasha. He tells her "I'm living my life like a haiku. Syllable by syllable." Perry is full of stories he wants to write, and Natasha tells him strange and captivating stories of her life. Finally, she writes him a letter that poetically encapsulates their relationship in a way that made me gasp.

The other favorite of mine was "We Didn't." It tells in an incredibly moving and poetic way a story of yearning and love, how a romantic beach adventure is interrupted by something that washes ashore, how every attempt to connect is interrupted. It is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, told so beguilingly.

I also loved "A Minor Mood" and "Je Reviens." I'm so glad I made it through to the second half of this book or I would have missed these wonderful stories.

[Jane]

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 closing “Je Reviens.” Trigger warning: “Live from Dreamsville” includes mistreatment of a dog, which almost ended things for me after story number two, but I persevered and am I’m happy to report the only mistreated things from there on are human. The memorable cast of characters includes Uncle Lefty who was prone to playing his sax to the pigeons on a rooftop overlooking Blue Island, Lefty’s musically spontaneous grandmother “playing the radiators with a ladle as if they were marimbas,” and Ralphie the blue-skinned younger brother of Chester Poskozim. Frequent narrator Perry and his friend Stosh are refreshingly drawn to things intellectual. Perry tries out on a girl a line of translated Mallarme poetry. “She merely gave me one of those looks that says if there’s one thing more tedious than being a bore it’s being a pretentious asshole. I knew she was impressed.” A poet of the urban landscape, Dybek takes us from St. Roman’s parochial school, to to the backseat of a Rambler that “smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa his father delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market,” to the fire truck graveyard and the (not so) Sanitary Canal, to the Zip Inn tavern, to a lakeshore escape north near the Baha’i temple, ending with a Marshall Field perfume counter at Christmas.

[Robert Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 violence,some sex and a whole lot of profanity. One thing that I didn’t understand was that all of the characters seemed to be great fans of Jack Brickhouse and the Chicago Cubs ,which as everyone knows is the north side team and the only baseball team I knew as a kid was the White Sox! Well all that aside I would have to say that you need to know Chicago to really appreciate the stories,which I might compare to “ Nielsen Algren “ and his novel “ the man with the golden arm”.
This was a beautiful collection of stories,each one a winner!

[Tali Zarate · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 right…We fishtailed left on Thirty-first, gunning past the Hospital for Contagious Diseases…By the next block we’d slowed to a crawl, hugging the curb as we passed the city auto pound…He stomped the gas, and we bounced over the rail tracks at Twenty-sixth just as the gates were dinging down.” Like the car itself, the prose revs to life with the power of these verbs and specific nouns, and we are there with the narrator and his pal, lurching out of the city, into the outskirts of town.

[dana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this one for class, it's so hard for me to rate anything lower than 2 stars but I genuinely disliked this one. The stories didn't connect, I couldn't see a point, and the only reason I got through it was because it was mandatory. The stories were so slow, too many unnecessary words and it took forever for it to make it's point. The chapters were too long and that only works if you REALLY want more of that story, which I don't. I was 75% into this book and by then I should've already been captured by this story and by then the reader should WANT to learn more, but I just really dreaded picking this one up. My favorite chapter is Live From Dreamsville, that chapter was beautiful and I deeply enjoyed it so much; However, I don't think your favorite chapter is supposed to be 2 chapters in because then the rest of the book can't and doesn't live up to that. Overall, I didn't really enjoy this one.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several stories about life in Chicago's South Side, varying degrees of connection between the stories. The stories seemed to feel more universal as time progressed. Maybe that was just me finding the later stories more relatable because they seem to take place in the 1970s... a decade much more familiar to me than the 1950s of Dybek's youth. I did, however, like the stories of the protagonist's childhood better than those of adolescence and beyond... so there's that.

This time I did not consume a collection of stories in a couple of marathon sessions. It was a much better experience as a result.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew Dybek (remotely) via my MFA program, where he was on the roster but never in house (having moved on). We finally met at the Prague Summer Program and he signed a copy for me. It has been on my shelf for, oh, 10 years...Recently, I got to it at last. Knowing he’d been awarded the MacArthur Foundation award for genius, I was skeptical, but by the time I finished the book, I have to say: it is masterful. His adeptness with the language made me feel like I was right there on the gritty streets of Chicago alongside his characters as they made their way through life. I am now a fan. I recommend this book of linked stories. They will move you.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did I rate this collection so highly? To wit:

"We Didn't"


“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 matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.”
― Stuart Dybek