Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Dybek, Stuart - Antioch Review (review date fall 1990)

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Antioch Review (review date fall 1990)

SOURCE: A review of The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek.Antioch Review 48, no. 4 (fall 1990): 545.

[In the following review, the critic compares Dybek's work to that of Hemingway.]

In 14 interlocked stories and vivid “short shorts” reminiscent of Hemingway's stark interludes in In Our Time, Dybek writes of a richly remembered Chicago of boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood. Dreamlike and phantasmagoric, his stories remain paradoxically vivid and realistic. Creatures of the night, his characters are apparitions, luminescent reflections and shadows who inhabit a rain-streaked, surreal city of memories and ghosts, of vanished ethnic neighborhoods and mournfully twisting, Kafkaesque streets leading nowhere. Dybek creates an eerie portrait of a vanished Chicago, populated by denizens as hauntingly spectral as those in Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, which provides...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 November 1979)
   2. Robert Ward (review date 1980)
   3. Bruce Cook (review date 13 January 1980)
   4. Phoebe Lou Adams (review date February 1980)
   5. Howard Kaplan (review date 23 May 1980)
   6. David Kubal (review date autumn 1980)
   7. Alice Bloom (review date summer 1987)
   8. Stuart Klawans (review date April 1990)
   9. Antioch Review (review date fall 1990)
   10. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 February 1990)
   11. Don Lee (review date spring 1991)
   12. Terry Caesar (review date summer 1991)
   13. David Montrose (review date 26 July 1991)
   14. Thomas S. Gladsky (essay date 1992)
   15. Thomas S. Gladsky (essay date summer 1995)
   16. Jorge Febles (essay date fall 1996)
   17. Stuart Dybek with Mike Nickel and Adrian Smith (interview date winter 1997)
   18. Don Lee (essay date spring 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright