Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Dybek, Stuart - David Kubal (review date Autumn 1980)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page
4. Tweet This

David Kubal (review date Autumn 1980)

SOURCE: A review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, in The Hudson Review. Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1980, pp. 445-47.

[In the following excerpt, Kubal states that Dybek's Childhood and Other Stories contains "stories of vigorous and brilliant unconventionality.]

In Stuart Dybek's first book, a group of eleven uncanny stories about childhood and adolescence, we encounter a world radically different from Miss Beattie's or Mr. Vivante's. It is the Southwest side of Chicago during the 1940s, fifties, and sixties, a Slavic neighborhood gradually being overtaken by Blacks and Spanish. It is also a harsh and repulsive section of the city, which the author's singular imagination nonetheless enchants, transforming it into a world of magical grotesques. With its antecedents in Russian, and, perhaps, in Yiddish literature (one is sometimes reminded of I. B. Singer's stories), as much as in...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Reg Saner (review date 1980)
   2. Robert Ward (review date 1980)
   3. Bruce Cook (review date 13 January 1980)
   4. Ivan Gold (review date 24 February 1980)
   5. David Clewell (review date Spring-Summer 1980)
   6. David Kubal (review date Autumn 1980)
   7. Joseph Coates (review date 8 April 1990)
   8. Michiko Kakutani (review date 20 April 1990)
   9. Katharine Weber (review date 20 May 1990)
   10. David Montrose (review date 26 July 1991)
   11. Thomas S. Gladsky (essay date Summer 1995)
   12. Stuart Dybek with Mike Nickel and Adrian Smith (interview date Winter 1997)
4. Copyright