The Coast of Chicago: Stories

by Stuart Dybek

Overview

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. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466806375
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/03/2004
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	274 KB

About the Author

Stuart Dybek is the award-winning author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan, and Brass Knuckles, a volume of poetry. A professor of English at Western Michigan University, he lives in Kalamazoo.

Stuart Dybek is the author of five books of fiction--Ecstatic Cahoots, Paper Lantern, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods--as well as two collections of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. Dybek is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers' Award, four O. Henry Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University.

Editorial Reviews

These 14 dreamlike stories include ``Nighthawks,'' a man's surreal subway journey inspired by a vision of his dead girlfriend, and ``Blight,'' the tale of a recurring nightmare, in which atomic bombs drop on Chicago when the White Sox win the pennant. Dybek's ``phantasmagoric'' collection ``evokes the bizarre mysteries of everyday life in Chicago's gritty ethnic enclaves,'' PW said. Author tour. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Has claim to comparison with Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Joyce's Dubliners. . .Dybek's energetic prose produces dazzling effects.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Moving and real and often brilliantly ambitious.” —Los Angeles Times

“A fictional world that is both ordinary and amazing.” —The New York Times

“Irresistible...Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Farrell, Mr. Bellow, Mr. Algren, please say hello to Stuart Dybek. He's one of yours.” —The Village Voice

“Establishes [Dybek] not merely as a talent but as a magician comparable to Eudora Welty and Joy Williams.” —Chicago Tribune

“Tender and unforgiving...No matter where you grew up, after reading these stories you'll have found the coast of Chicago” —San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher