The Coast of Chicago: Stories
by Stuart Dybek
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stuart DybekEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-04-03
ISBN: 0312424256
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Coast of Chicago: Stories
Book Review: A Literary Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
WARNING: I can't say enough about this book.
I stumbled across Stuart Dybek's short story, "We Didn't" (I Sailed with Magellan) in my university's Short Story class, and immediately fell in love with the prose:
"We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs."
I mean, does it really get any better than that? So I did the next most obvious thing a girl can do... I bought his collective works (Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicago, Brass Knuckles, and Streets in Their Own Ink), and fell so much in love with two of them that I had to also purchase signed, first edition hardbacks.
Now, I must to mention that I am an avid reader, averaging 5+ books per month (at the very least), so Dybek rocketing past Kerouac, Joyce, Faulkner, and Emerson for me really says something.
As far as "The Coast of Chicago," is concerned, I believe it to be the very best of Dybek's short stories, "Streets in Their Own Ink" being my favorite of his poetry anthologies.
"Coast" includes the following stories:
*Farwell
*Chopin in Winter
*Lights
*Death of the Right Fielder
*Bottle Caps
*Blight
*Outtakes
*Bijou
*Strays
*Nighthawks (Includes my favorites, "Transport," "Insomnia," and "The Gold Coast")
*The Woman Who Fainted
*Hot Ice
*Lost
*Pet Milk
"Coast" is beautifully written, including lines such as:
"A kiss crosses the city. It rides a glass streetcar that showers blue, electric sparks along the ghost of a track--a track paved over in childhood--the line that she and her mother used to take downtown.
A kiss crosses the city, revolves through a lobby door into a rainy night, catches a cab along a boulevard of black glass, and, running red lights, dissolves behind the open fans of wiper blades.
Rain spirals colorlessly out of the dark, darkens all it touches and makes it gleam.
Her kiss crosses the city, enters a subway tunnel that descends at this deserted hour like a channel through an underground world. It's timeless there, always night, as if the planet doesn't turn below the street. At the mouth of the station stands a kid who's gone AWOL and now has nowhere to go, a young conga drummer, a congacero, wearing a fatigue jacket and beating his drum. He has the pigeons up past their bedtime doing the mambo."
- "Transport" (within "Nighthawks")
I could go on and on, quite literally, quoting passage after passage of electric words from each story, but I won't. Buy the book, PLEASE, buy it, read it, and share it with your friends. I find it to be such a shame that it isn't better known, that more people are not reading Dybek, because they really should be.
Dybek has been compared to Richard Carver, in some circles, and as a Polish Kerouac in others. I personally feel he is in a league of his own, his stories painting brief snapshots of various areas in Chicago (think "Dubliners" set on the Coast of Chicago). It's really very beautiful and hypnotic; quite easily the best book of short stories I own, and I can't recommend it enough.
It is my humble opinion that this book belongs on everyone's bookshelf. Especially yours!
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