The Coast of Chicago

by Dybek, Stuart
ISBN: 9780312424251
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Used - Trade Paperback - 9780312424251

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Overview

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.

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Dybek, Stuart
  • ISBN: 9780312424251
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.20 x 0.60
  • Number Of Pages: 173
  • Publication Year: 2004

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  • Weird and wonderful

    Jef L. - 5 years 11 months ago

    Stuart Dybek's "The Coast of Chicago" remains a touchstone story collection of the urban Midwest. Indeed "The Windy City" is front and center in all of these stories, though it's more often the gritty south side environs of Dybek's youth which gets explored and where his dreamers and drifters come alive. The fusion of immigrant Polish, Czech, Eastern European, Latino, etc., neighborhoods reveals the often overlooked diversity and magic embedded in this vibrant city, and Dybek's poetic, gritty, and dreamlike prose brings it all to life. Whether in small vignettes that are little more than a few pages or in longer pieces like the story "Blight," Dybek recounts the Chicago of the Sixties and Seventies where those striving for a piece of the American Dream butted heads with the working class realities of urban decay and poverty. Nevertheless, "The Coast of Chicago" vividly captures a time and place with the ambition of such celebrated Chicago writers as Algren and Bellow, while making its own unique mark in the literary firmament of a great American city.

    HPB Staff Review