Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories by Stuart Dybek

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories Reviews

• 
  Ryan

  I’ve made a point of getting all the Dybek I can lay my hands on - no easy feat in the UK. I was glad I did, even if half my copy has pencilled annotations and a bookmark from a Dublin Catholic Church.
  
  No one’s prose fizzes quite like Dybek’s. He writes of city life with gritty exactitude and a sense of wonder. He is Chicago’s answer to Alasdair Gray. No one serious about the art of the short story should ignore him.
• 
  Andy Weston

  Dybek is a second generation Polish American born and raised in Chicago. This is a novel in stories, of his adolescent heroes with grimy urban backgrounds of the South Side of the city in the 1970s, the common factor being hopes and dream in adversity, not yet metamorphosed into nightmares.
  This was my first experience of Dybek, and it wasn't long before I realised I was in the hands of a master. Rarely have I read such a collection of what in effect are short stories with such consistent brilliance.
  From the precise, it would be reasonable to expect dark and depressing reading, but Dybek writes with a stark realism blended with a curiously appealing playfulness; the darker he pluges the more vivid the images he conjures, and the more compelling the prose. Comparisons to Saul Bellow, Ginsberg or Dylan are not out of place. Some of stories have a quality to them that reminds me of Goya's Black Paintings, prints of several I have around the house.
  In my favourite, Horror Movie, 12 year old Calvin arrives home to blood all over the bathroom, and his mother missing. The old Puerto Rican lady upstairs tells him not to worry, but once alone, he is terrified by nightmares. The next day he sneaks into a movie theatre where he sees a surreal horror film and the old toothless usher offers to give him a gum job. On leaving the cinema it is like the neighbourhood has changed, he sees monsters, and the true squalidity of what’s around him. Its 'coming of age' writing as good as I can remember reading.
  These are a set of stories that cover the spectrum of adolescent experiences, emotions and epiphanies, they are at times hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always moving and compassionate.
  
  A couple of quotations. From Neighborhood Drunk...
  

  The summer we were fifteen, Dan discovered an old suitcase of his father’s liqueur miniatures. The suitcase had been on the back porch for years and it was like coming on a hidden treasure chest. They looked like jewels, exquisite shapes of glass glowing ruby, Amber, creme-de-menthe emerald.
  We’d sneak back there on June evenings with the light out in the kitchen and Dan’s parents in the front of the apartment watching TV. I had a penlight and we’d study the labels before sampling. It brought the world into our lives as no geography book ever could. From necks narrower than a straw drops of exotic places burned on our tongues: Cognac, Chartreuse, Curaçao.

  
  
  and, from Sauerkraut Soup..
  

  In high school the priests had cautioned us against the danger of books.
  “The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it already is, Marzek”.
  I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so that I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education-The Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you, (2) study what they condemn .

  
  
  It’s available on OpenLibrary if it’s a struggle to find it at a reasonable price.
• 
  Jane

  Dybek draws you in with stunningly evocative tales of slavic Chicago in the '50s and '60s. The blue collar ethnic, Catholic culture he draws from was just a few miles west of my Southside childhood but might as well have been on the other side of the world. The writing is as rich and raw as the duck's blood one of stories' many unfortuate children must procure for his ailing grandmother. (And mention of poultry reminds me to tell you pigeon fans that there are plenty of those.) The landscape is profoundly urban, with nary a Yuppie in sight: crumbling, rusty, industrial. I'm particularly fond of Dybek's palette of artificial lighting colors - the "mint blue" of a bowling alley for example. And his characters are as memorable as the scenes he places them in. The Palatski Man: "He reappeared in spring, some Sunday morning, perhaps Easter, when the twigs of the catalpa trees budded and lawns smelled of mud..." (palatski is some kind of eastern European sweet, but I've Googled in vain to determine if it really existed.)
• 
  Benjamin Obler

  Fantastic short story collection. Launched straight into my Top 10 of all time. Chicago's streets, immigrant lives, dreamy America, beautiful eccentricities. This is a vivid world painted with Dybek's unique palette. His prose is so accessible and so exceptionally crackling without being showy or inauthentic like you sometimes get in Wells Tower, for example. Dybek never trips over himself. As a writer, I may just sit down and chart how he starts sentences; he has wonderful variety and rhythm. "Visions of Budhardin" is almost certainly going in my fiction workshop: a psychedelic tale in which a man in an elephant suit trashes a church and is chased out of town.
  
  I will read it again. The run of stories at the heart of this collection, from "Neighborhood Drunk" to "Charity" was a delight. I kept anticipating a stinker--never came.
  
  
• 
  Rachel Hermans Goldman

  This was my first reading of Dybek's debut collection of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Although these stories do not gut me as much as his later works, particularly my favorite of his collections I Sailed With Magellan, his prose throughout these stories definitely makes you itch to go and write. As always, I love Dybek's ability to cultivate memorable settings, especially his knack at keeping place vivid and present throughout a story.
  
  One of the most inspirational aspects of this collection is Dybek's skill for depicting children and teens coming to terms with the adult world. He captures these experiences with an aching honesty, which is both beautiful and painful to read. My favorite story from the collection and example of this is "Blood Soup."
• 
  Vicki

  This collection was a game changer for me. I was beginning to study writing fiction, and working it out for myself, when along came this book. I have first edition, with its green dustjacket, that I had Stu sign for me when I first met him. It was the first time I connected with material about Chicago that wasn't Sister Carrie, or the like. I remember reading the first story in the collection sort of breathlessly -- seeing where the characters were running, what it looked like -- the grassy lots in the middle of a city. So I sort of started growing up as a writer and a reader with this collection. It's vivid, and stays with you for a long time, no matter the circumstances.
• 
  Kathleen

  Dybek's early work is, if possible, even more intense and hypnotizing than his later masterpieces Coast of Chicago and I Sailed with Magellan. He combines the classic melancholy of Joyce with the earthy fatality of Dostoyevsky, then condenses all of this emotion into stories that rarely waste a word. His early work betrays his training as a poet: the metaphors are vivid and pulsing, the images stark, the young characters as complex and confused as we can all remember. This collection is not one to pick up lightly.
• 
  Jason Pettus

  [Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
  
  It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
  
  But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
  
  Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
  
  A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
  
  And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
  
  With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history.
• 
  Tim Storm

  Ever read James Joyce's "Araby"? Dybek's stories are a lot like that. They have a nostalgic feel. Many of them are written from the perspectives of children/adolescents discovering new aspects of their worlds--namely, the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago. These are places that may still exist, but surely not as described by Dybek, who writes of yesteryear. These kids inhabit a sort of wonderland (a time/place that no longer exists); as a result, the stories have a fabulist feel even though most of them are pretty realist (with the exception of "Visions of Budhardin," which is a little too weird to be plausible). A few of the stories dip into fantasy (often right at the end), but most remain in the natural world. The NYT review on the back cover says, "Dybek . . . bends his flair for naturalism on the anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent with the logic of childhood." Yeah, more or less. Mostly less. He is pretty good at rendering the worlds of his characters, though. And his psychological insight is astute. All in all, this is a great collection with some wonderful storytelling.
• 
  Ruth

  These stories, all set in Chicago, are arranged in an arc from youngest protagonist to oldest, and then the last two--probably the most emotionally powerful--are again about young, abandoned boys. The specific setting is usually one of the South Side neighborhoods of poor Polish and other Eastern European immigrants. The stories were originally written/published in the 1970s, and they are set in decades prior to that one.
  
  Dybek's mastery of gritty imagery--smells, sights, sounds, textures--of working-class and impoverished neighborhoods is impressive, inexhaustible. Even the holy water in the parish church is in keeping with the setting: "It was salty and stale from a thousand fingertips, with some kind of fungus floating at the bottom as in a dirty fishbowl."
  
  These are neighborhoods that I will definitely revisit, though they haven't been cleaned up for tourists.
• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  My teacher in the MFA program at Western Michigan University, graduated 1984. I went there from Grand Rapids to work specifically with him after reading this book, then his poetry that I didn't like quite as much, and every story I could get my hands on. He admitted me to the program after a pitcher of beer at a K-zoo bar; I had sent him a couple of my stories, but we never talked about them, we just told stories of Michigan. He had read the stories, he said, as we left for our cars, and liked them. He's at NW now, back in Chicago, near the Pilsen he has written about all his life. About this collection: amazing. A mix of sweetness, gritty realism, deft observation, and some Polish Catholicism/mysticism... Growing up in Pilsen stories.
• 
  Mikey

  I first heard of Stuart Dybek through reading an interview with George Saunders and since I work in a library (“well, then why does he seem so god-DAMN stupid?!!”) I popped right up and snagged this one and I’m happy I did. I think of palatski (a treat that I can only imagine, having Googled it and found myself frustratingly directed back to the source of my question), chicken blood, and pervert ushers lurking in nightmare theaters when I think of this.
• 
  Eliza T. Williamson

  Once again the amazing Hester recommended an author to me that can do in his prose with effortlessness what I struggle to achieve in a sentence. Dybek writes brave, true, seedy and poignant stories about growing up--that alternately mena and vulnerable time when you can get away with nothing and everything and want to evaporate and be noticed. The stories are all set in Chicago which adds an element of grit and danger specific to urban life.
• 
  Chris

  For me, some of the stories are brilliant, some eccentric, some surreal, some nightmarish or a combination of all of these things. I found the writing compelling, the characters interesting and enjoyed the gritty urban setting of 50s-60s Chicago. This is a unique reading experience.
• 
  Benji Tomlinson

  Prose as poetry. Words for the sake of their beauty. Stories that go nowhere but take you on a journey. I loved this collection. Not everything has to tell a grand tale or make a point. Sometimes words can just take you to a place in time and show you a glimpse of life. That is what Dybek has done here. Thank you again and again, Sir.
• 
  Pearse Anderson

  I just didn't vibe with this in terms of conflict and character. Story after story I found myself not wanting to go on, so eventually I stopped reading like 60% of the way through. An interesting view of 50s and 60s Polish Chicago, yes, but not to the degree I wanted.
• 
  Michael Cormier-O’Leary

  While I made it through this whole collection, very few of these stories made me feel much of anything. This was his debut, and he clearly already had descriptive prowess, but a lot of these stories just fizzled out
• 
  Heather Gibbons

  Thus far, "The Wake" is my favorite story. The one about the two little boys trying to find goose blood for grandma's soup was pretty memorable, too.
  
  ***
  
  What a strong debut collection-- can't wait to read his more mature work. In terms of range and tone and tenor, these stories all live in the same register and share a lot in terms of plot and theme too-- versions of the hero's journey, loss of innocence, etc.. But Dybek's take on these these familiar elements, within the vivid and even lurid setting of Chicago's underbelly, feels somehow both fresh and oddly timeless.
• 
  Casey

  I've read Coast of Chicago and I really liked it, but this collection didn't do as much for me. There a couple great stories, but a few drift a little too far into the surreal/absurd for my personal tastes. But, having said that, he's still one of the best short story writers in the business and I'm looking forward to reading I Sailed with Magellan.
• 
  tai

  gorgeous stories, gorgeous imagery, low plot - when you're dealing with kids' world, it's easy to get by on low plot since everything is steeped in attention and meaning. lush characters, strong & believable voice-- it's incredible this was dybek's first collection.
• 
  Nan

  This doesn't quite have the compression of his later work, but all the talent, all the pieces and parts are there. Dybek's neighborhoods are cold, dark, part horror movie and part blood soup. There are few happy endings here.
• 
  Karen Alexander

  An interesting group of short stories linked largely through place (Chicago) and sometimes local lore/peripheral characters. Perhaps not Dybek's best work, or rather most memorable, but an impressive first collection for its cleanness and occasional beautiful observation.
• 
  Abby

  Lovely stories from the bard of Chicago.
• 
  Adam

  Astonishing insights into the life of the child, from a little-known master.
• 
  Loreen Niewenhuis

  the city of chicago is a wonderful character in these stories
• 
  Beth Shields-Szostak

  signed by author
• 
  Melanie H

  Wonderful slice of life stories. How an ordinary life can seem so miraculous.
• 
  Christine

  Lovely stories set in Chicago and starring Polish immigrants and their descendants. Lovely magical realistic quality.