The Coast of Chicago
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.
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.
Customer Reviews
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Please read this book. I'm not going to say that you're going to like it, or even appreciate it. My reason for asking you to read this book is so that you know what a real story is like. Good is a subjective term, so I can't say that good to you means good to me. All I know is that these stories are the closest you will ever come to reading a real story.