Coast of Chicago: Stories - Softcover

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.

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.
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