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From Publishers Weekly

Dybek ( Childhood and Other Neighborhoods ) here evokes the bizarre mysteries of everyday life in Chicago's gritty ethnic enclaves, the territory of the 14 stories in his second collection. The author's memorable characters lead odd, fairy-tale existences. Marcy in "Chopin in Winter" returns home from college pregnant and disgraced, and plays her way through Chopin's piano oeuvre before moving without warning (her note reads simply "Ma, don't worry") to a black neighborhood on the city's South Side. In "Nighthawks," a suite of meditations on love and loss, Choco, a conga drummer, is led through the subways on a hauntingly surreal trip inspired by a vision of his dead girlfriend. Dybek's fiction is not without a comic edge: Ziggy Zilinski in "Blight" suffers from a recurring nightmare in which atomic bombs drop on Chicago when the White Sox win the pennant. A quote from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado provides the phantasmagoric book with an apt epigraph: "Out of the whole of memory, there's one thing worthwhile: the great gift of calling back dreams." Dybek has this exemplary gift. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"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