[In the following excerpt, Coates asserts that Dybek's The Coast of Chicago is further proof of the renaissance of the short story.]

The market is minuscule and shrinking further under the heat of bottom-line publishing forces—just one weekly magazine, the New Yorker, now regularly publishes short stories, as opposed to more than 50 in the days before TV. Yet the form is booming in both quantity and especially quality, as editor Shannon Ravenel confirms in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.

I believe the 1980s will be known as another golden age [of the short story], though for reasons very different from those which led to the story's great popularity in the teens and twenties, when writers could live off their work in a way that today's practitioners could not.

Though I not only agree with this but also will soon offer more proof of it, Ravenel's excellent collection, to which we will return, is misleadingly titled, to the extent that anyone might infer that the book includes all the best stories or writers of the '80s. To start with the most glaring omission, it hasn't one story by Stuart Dybek, whose second collection of stories establishes him as not merely a talent but a magician comparable to Eudora Welty and Joy Williams.

Not since Cyrus Colter's The Beach Umbrella, 20 years ago, has a book of Chicago stories hit me as hard as Dybek's The Coast of Chicago. Its excellence again suggests that the "renaissance" of the short story discussed by Ravenel may involve a return to regionalism among our best writers (E. Annie Proulx and Howard Frank Mosher in New England, Richard Ford, Tom McGuane and Rick Bass in the Far West and South, to name just a few), and Dybek's tone of eloquent, rueful valedictory to a childhood place gives his book specific links (probably intentional, in the spirit of homage) to the early story collections of two other Midwestern elegists, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway.

Like Hemingway's In Our Time, The Coast of Chicago interleaves sketchy one or two-page vignettes, which are sometimes intact stories themselves, between stories of more or less standard length—though, unlike Hemingway, Dybek often links the two, the sketch serving as a prologue to the story. For example, the one-and-a-half pages of "Bottle Caps" describe how the child narrator's collection of beer-bottle caps, carefully harvested from the alleys behind taverns, is stolen by his kid brother: "'I've been using them as tombstones,' he said, 'in my insect graveyard.'"

This introduces an absolute marvel of a story, both macabre and funny and itself only three pages long, called "The Death of the Right Fielder" that could have been written by Donald Barthelme or Kafka—or, more accurately, it was written by a homegrown Kafka who knows the terminal boredom and alienation of playing right field in sandlot games. "After too many balls went out and never came back we went out to check," it begins. "It was a long walk—he always played deep. Finally we saw him, from the distance resembling the towel we sometimes threw down for second base."

This unlikely tone of hilarious, anti-sentimental eulogy is maintained even in the presence of the deceased, as his teammates try to figure out what killed him: "Nor could it have been leukemia. He wasn't a talented enough player for that. He'd have been playing center, not right, if leukemia was going to get him."

These stories are not only set in Chicago, they also breathe it. The brilliantly compressed, 27-page "Nighthawks" (named after the Edward Hopper painting) is an impressionistic novel-in-miniature that floats the reader on a river of rain past a kaleidoscopic view of the city at night—a Hopperesque diner, an ethnic neighborhood on the Near South Side, lovers waking at dawn in a Gold Coast apartment—complete with subtitled chapters and recurring characters.

Like George Willard at the end of Winesburg, Ohio, the unnamed narrator who has guided us through many of these stories is on a train and bidding farewell not only to his childhood but also its locale at the end of The Coast of Chicago. Both think of "little things," but George, who lived in a different time, merely visualizes the "tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel," while Dybek's young narrator, in the empty conductor's booth of a CTA train hurtling toward Evanston, is urgently making love to a woman he'll soon part from, as he glimpses "the landscape of the El I'd memorized from subway windows over a lifetime of rides: the podiatrist's foot sign past Fullerton…."

A high school kid on a platform waves and grins as he catches sight of the couple, and "[i]t was as if I were standing on that platform … on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I'd have loved seeing someone like us streaming by."

What's interesting here is the reversal of direction. Dybek's narrator is leaving Chicago, while Willard was heading toward it. Anderson, Hemingway and Edgar Lee Masters used their early books of small-town life as weapons in a "revolt from the village" that would take them to Chicago and beyond; Dybek's lyric nostalgia looks back with almost unqualified fondness on urban neighborhoods that were like small towns in their sense of community.

It's almost as if the writers of the '80s had skipped back several literary generations to have their heroes light out for the territory with Huck Finn—the same territory as before, essentially, but settled now with clusters of academics, scientists, writers-in-residence and corporate types, all co-existing uneasily with Bobbie Ann Mason's or Russell Banks' embittered and culturally uprooted small-town natives….