Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories by Stuart Dybek

Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Reviews

• 
  Abby

  I was not familiar with Stuart Dybek's stories until I recently listened to the New Yorker fiction podcast of ZZ Packer reading Dybek's wonderful "Paper Lantern." That story is not in this collection; it's in "Paper Lantern," a book of nine stories also published last year, at the same time as "Ecstatic Cahoots." Here you'll find fifty short -- many very short -- stories that are often weird and mostly wonderful. This is "Misterioso," the first story in the book, in its entirety:
  
  "You're going to leave your watch on?"
  "You're leaving on your cross?"
  
  And "Ransom":
  
  Once in college, broke and desperate, I kidnapped myself.
  Ransom notes were sent to all interested parties. Later, I sent hair and fingernail clippings as well.
  They steadfastly insisted on an ear.
  
  Welcome to Dybek's world. Many of these stories feature a couple in various states of erotic thrall. In one, they've been thrown out of a movie theater for public lewdness. In another, while she dozes on a blanket on the grass, he is carried off by a single ant. In a third, they exchange fantasies and when she says she would like to shave him with an old-fashioned straight razor, he says "sounds nice," while thinking there's no way in hell she's getting near him with a razor. Then there's the nun who beans the conductor and hijacks a streetcar, the boy who is visited every night by a tiny bride and groom, the old man who checks into a cheap hotel to die, the coat from another life that might take a man back to who he was supposed to be before he became who he is.
  
  There are recurring themes and images in these stories, also characters who may or may not be reappearing. As might be expected in a collection of fifty of anything, some are forgettable, some even regrettable. But when Dybek is at his best, he is really, really good.
  
  
• 
  Andy Weston

  Picture Chicago just as a snowstorm hits.
  
  A young lad, 20 years old, has left the return home from his girl-friend’s family house late. She has been helping him study Spanish for a test the next day. He had hoped for an invitation to stay over, but with strict parents no such luck, so with the transport system already suspended, and pretty much nobody outside as the snow comes in heavy, in unsuitable clothing, he sets out to walk home.
  
  After a while, to warm up, he stops at a seedy bar, the only place left open it seems. Surely it’s a myth that the Bears drink there, but when he walks in, sure enough, they are there.
  Being underage though, it’s a brief stay.
  
  Back outside, one of the few vehicles still on the road, a solo driver of a limo, offers him a lift. The snow is that heavy now that to stop may mean the vehicle won’t get moving again; could be he has been picked up as the driver may need someone to push.
  
  This is Córdoba.
  The story of long remembered chance encounters has a novelistic quality to it. It is rich in atmosphere, humour and completely engaging.
  If I ever despair of contemporary American writing, which seems quite often these days, I reach for Dybek.
  
  This book is a collection of 50 pieces, some flash fiction and some longer pieces.
  
  
  
  The rest of the stories in the book I enjoyed far less. Most of them are flash fiction, 200-500 words. I feel out of my depth here. I’ll have to revisit them at some stage, as I think they require a different approach from the reader, more like reading poetry than reading a short story.
• 
  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.
• 
  Patrick Brown

  Beautiful, sometimes mesmerizing collection of short (sometimes very short) stories from one of the real masters of the form. These stories are sometimes linked (several stories involve characters named Gil and Bea) but mostly they just have recurring themes and motifs (looking back at the Jazz Age, intimacy and vulnerability, mist, snowfall, Chicago). I tended to prefer the more realist stories in this book, but occasionally a story like "Swing," with strong metaphorical content, would knock me over. Highly recommended.
  
  My favorites from this collection:
  
  "Transaction"
  "Cordoba"
  "Swing"
  "Tea Ceremony"
  "Flies"
  "Brisket"
  "Happy Ending"
• 
  Tuck

  50 short stories in 200 pages, so short shorts. and while dybek is no lydia davis, he would be perfectly acceptable to your yuppie older brother, or straight lace suburb neighbor, if they read books that is.
  dybek is full of tenderness and sentimentality, made good by setting them mostly in the poor and mean streets of chicago, where tenderness could get you killed, or beat up, or laughed at anyway. so a certain bravery too, to these stories of love, mostly.
• 
  Printable Tire

  I had to sort of speed-read the last couple of stories in here because my copy was due at the library. It's a ridiculous and stupid thing to have to do, like speed-reading poetry.
  
  I didn't like all the stories but when there's 50 of them odds are one or two won't be to your liking. Most of them, however, are. Dybek has some really great "lyrical" writing (an adjective I've never stooped to use before) and finds the mother of invention in the minutest of details. For every gross horny-dad sex scene there's a line I love, although the only one I thought to write down was this one, when a seedy bellhop witnesses a pair of rosaries looping out of a keyhole:
  "even in a fog you can't be lost once you understand the journey takes you from Station to Station."
  
  I also loved the use of tropes that connected some stories in the gentlest of ways. This is truly a great collection, one that compels me to want to write, the rarest of things.
• 
  Jim

  I had a chance recently to hear Stuart Dybek read at the College of DuPage, and really liked the story he read which is included in this collection.
  With 50 stories, it has to be expected that some are great and some are forgettable.
  There is much to think about here. Often the stories are arranged so that a word or idea in one story emerges in the next. There is remarkable lyricism, and often remarkable weirdness. Some of the shortest stories are fragments.
  
• 
  Tom

  Bring your dream-brain, poetical brain, lover's brain to the reading and you'll be just fine. Good stuff.
• 
  Bex

  3.5 ish, inspiring for sure, but not as memorable as I'd hoped!
• 
  Marian Beaman

  Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (2014) is a collection of micro-fiction by Stuart Dybek, ranging from one to five or six pages in length. Pithy and often macabre, Dybek’s style, to me, seems reminiscent of both Flannery O’Connor and Edward Albee, sometimes absurd but always meaningful. The table of contents features a kaleidoscope of topics: Ordinary Nudes, Ransom, Flu, Brisket, Belly Button, Transients Welcome, and Pink Ocean.
  
  Expect to be jolted into an alternate reality in stories like “Ravenswood” in which a nun, exchanging her habit for that of a conductor, hijacks a bus. Find the book’s title embedded in the story “Swing,” which provides the context for the phrase “ecstatic cahoots” originating in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Revel in the lyrical prose in the same story: “They were racing along the puddled forest path strewn with deadfall and, afraid he’d trip, the boy didn’t dare look back. The rush of his running drew the skin tight over his face, as if he were masked in latex.”
  
  Winner of four O’Henry Awards and a McArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient, Dybek is the fiction writer to turn to for thrilling encounters and escapes into the strange, the intimate, and often puzzling stories that reflect the human condition.
• 
  V

  I was fairly impatient with this book. Partly my own fault: with something so short--comprising bite-sized pieces, many not even be long enough to be called flash fiction--I feel the urge to finish very quickly. Many of the pieces were prose poems and poems require time and stillness to appreciate. A lot of the pieces were very dreamy... and hearing about someone else's dreams is rarely satisfying. And there were so many of them. I don't remember The Coast of Chicago being like this.
  
  Still, some of the pieces were engaging, and I even found some of the more poetic ones arresting.
  
  I would advise a potential reader of this book to read it one or two pieces at a time, preferably on rainy afternoons with a cup of tea.
• 
  Richard

  I saw Dybek read from this a few years ago and I enjoyed it enough to buy it, get it signed, and read about half of it. I just read the whole thing and I like some parts of it, but its decadence is not as appealing to me now as it might have been then. The undercurrent of drunk horniness that suffuses this book is well-written, but is not as relevant to me at this point in my life as it has been in others (alas!). It’s clear that he gets a lot from Fitzgerald (even the title), and I think he’s a worthy heir to that style.
• 
  Jody

  This is my first Dybek collection and I found it brilliant. His use of language and his way of turning a descriptive phrase is not to be missed. I am a fan of flash fiction, of which this collection contains several. The opening story, 'Mysterioso', I found to be phenomenal at setting a scene and letting you know the characters with so few words it is genius. I have his collection Paper Lanterns on my TBR, which I will dig out ASAP. Recommended.
• 
  Valerie Miner

  Here is my review of PAPER LANTERN from the San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July, 2014
  
  Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 207 pages, $24.00
  Ecstatic Cahoots by Stuart Dybek
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pages, $15.00
  REVIEWED BY VALERIE MINER
  
  June is a great month to celebrate fiction with the publication of Stuart Dybek’s two effervescent, musical collections, Paper Lantern, nine love stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots, fifty short-short stories. His characters explore urban Chicago and the edges of Lake Michigan as they muse about weather, sex, romance and the multiple meanings of life. Author of three previous story collections and two books of poetry, Dybek, at 72, isn’t the most prolific of writers, but he is among the most acclaimed, with fellowships and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA as well as a Lannan Award, a Whiting Award, the O’Henry Prize and the PEN/Malamud Prize.
  Dybek’s upbringing in Chicago’s South West Side, a multi-ethnic blue collar community, fuels these pieces as do this Catholic education and his passion for jazz. He uses childhood memories as well as adult experiences as a social worker, teacher and long-time professor. The stories are discursive, often spirals or circles, braiding realism, fantasy and lyricism.
  The title story in Paper Lantern describes three colleagues leaving their lab for supper at a fabled local café, the Chinese Laundry, a former washing establishment whose only concession to dining décor is a red paper lantern. Over dessert, one asks, “Say, did anyone turn off the Bunsen burner…” 195 The color red threads through the tale as they share a blood orange under the lantern light and worry about fire. Back at the lab, they discover, “Flames occupy the top floor….through radiant, buckling windows, we can see the mannequins from the dressmaker’s showroom. Naked, wigs on fire, they appear to gyrate lewdly before they topple.” 195
  As the narrator watches the lab’s conflagration, he recalls a lover he once photographed staring at a big blaze along a Chicago River. His ten page digression into sexual passion and automotive danger comprises two-thirds of the story, which eventually takes us back to the ruined lab. “The wind gusts, fanning the bitter chill of night even as it fans the flames, and instinctively we all edge closer to the fire.” 207
  “Four Deuces” introduces Rosie and Frank, gamblers who buy a tavern from Verman the German. They have big dreams of fixing it up and turning into a popular, profitable watering hole. “We put up an old Solidarność poster and a picture of the Polish Pope next to Mayor Daley. Frank figured immigrants want a little of the homeland, so we put in Żywiec on tap…” 73 Rosie and Frank are luckier at the track than in domestic life. Infidelity, desertion, violence and retribution drive the hot, humid and snowy, cold novella as Rose breathlessly relates her saga about “sumnabitch” Frank to a customer at the bar.
  Dybek is an erudite man who conveys his wide-ranging intelligence in a pleasingly common language. He finds beauty in loss as well as in communion. Both new books reveal a taste for the wild and ridiculous. Despite his penchant for metafiction, the story structures here are more organic than engineered and his dramas are driven by feeling rather than by idea. Dybek’s tone ranges from melancholic to sardonic to hilarious to bitter to nostalgic to deceptively indifferent.
  Ecstatic Cahoots is the perfect title for his micro-fictions, which range from two lines to ten pages. Some, like the Hopperesque “Inland Sea,” read like prose poems.
  “Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it to a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.” 186
  The comical and wrenching, “Ravenswood,” portrays a nun hijacking a streetcar. 91 “‘I’m not in the habit of doing this,’ the Nun says from behind him. …she knocks him silly with a blow from her missal. …the Conductor finds himself hanging from a hand strap toward the rear of the streetcar. The rosary binds his wrists. He’s dressed…in the Nun’s black robes; her sensible shoes, untied, pinch his feet.” 91 As the streetcar reels forward, the conductor is lurched into deep introspection. “…he’d taken being a conductor for granted, treated it merely as a job, an identity he stripped off with the uniform, when, dear God!, it was his life.” 94
  In “Flu,” Faye, recently returned from sick leave, is noticed for the first time by Aldo. “And later, when people would ask how they met and fell in love, it was always Aldo who would answer, ‘Flu.’ He’d smile earnestly. ‘It all started with the flu.’” 69
  Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern confirm Dybek as a virtuoso of the short story—a nimble, compassionate writer who uses precise, lucid, original descriptions. He shows us all we need to know and nothing more.
  END
  
  Valerie Miner is the author of fourteen books including her new novel, Traveling with Spirits. She teaches at Stanford University and her website is
  www.valerieminer.com.
• 
  Daniel Moskowitz

  Start with your second best joke and end with your best.
  
  This one comes pretty close to that comedic mantra but sadly the ones in the middle don't fill your stomach. I found myself more annoyed by the bad shorts than amused by the good ones.
• 
  Mike Hammer

  A great collection of flash fiction, full of the bizarre, touching and impactful stories that Dybek always provides.
• 
  Beau

  Beautiful, weird, remarkable little stories. I enjoyed about 40 out of 50 of them very much.
• 
  David

  Mostly solid, often good, sometimes great.
• 
  Jess

  Read nearly all of this and found some sparks but mostly it didn’t make me feel good, and the characters felt dated in a particular trying too hard way.
• 
  Brian Beatty

  Not The Coast of Chicago, but still an engaging collection with masterful examples of the short form.
• 
  Full Stop

  
  http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...
  
  Review by Lacey N. Dunham
  
  Stuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern: Love Stories should be sold with a warning: do not read if you’re recovering from recent heartbreak. Or, more properly, if you’ve ever experienced heartbreak. Set mainly in the Midwest, and in particular Dybek’s beloved Chicago, he writes head on about the city’s poor and working class with the same ease as he examines the inner lives of over-educated academics. Each of the nine stories in the collection is about love the way that Romeo and Juliet is about love — sure, men and women fall for each other, but after the sparks and sex, things fall apart. In Dybek’s world, everyone more or less survives, at least in the metaphysical sense, though it speaks to the understated complexity of his stories whether surviving heartbreak is worth it.
  
  The decline of love in Dybek’s collection can be swift, as in “Waiting,” which opens with a reflection on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and goes on to address waiting in other literary works from Melville to Joyce, before always returning to Hemingway’s elegiac stories. Dybek weaves “Waiting” with these meditations while flipping between Jack’s current relationship with Lise and his flawed, complicated relationship with Felice, a woman we meet in “Seiche,” one of the collection’s strongest pieces. In “Waiting,” we know Jack’s relationship with Lise isn’t sustainable — the Hemingway is a dead giveaway — and we watch as the two adults carefully dance around each other’s vulnerabilities and hopes while we simultaneously wait for the crash. In “Seiche,” however, Jack is a younger man and his love for Nisa, a Lebanese student, burns the page with the ache of yearning and the tragedy of a first love, here rendered poignant because Nisa, after boarding a plane to return to war-torn Beirut for her grandfather’s funeral, disappears, vanishing from Jack’s life and the second half of the story. Her conspicuous absence acknowledges a large truth, though, about how our greatest loves never quite relinquish their hold on our hearts.
  
  Read the rest here:
  http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...
• 
  Elizabeth

  The good: I liked some of these stories, although none as much as those in Paper Lantern. I particularly liked how it started with a two line story: "You're going to leave your watch on?" / "You're leaving on your cross?" And then how there are another couple stories that build on this first one from different perspectives. I like how there are two that are obviously the same characters but do not acknowledge the difference in the phase of the relationship that they cover. I love the part in Transients Welcome: ..."the body is a hotel. Transients enter, becoming guests. Until they arrived, the Bellboy was unaware of all his vacancies. He thought there was only one room available. When the deadbeat guests refused to leave, it became obvious there were other, secret rooms. Instead of checking out, the guests moved down a corridor lit by a red EXIT sign and lined with unnumbered rooms that didn't require keys or maid service; rooms that call for Philip Morris. The closer to the EXIT sign, the smokier and smaller the rooms, until they are too narrow for anything but bedbugs, an ashtray of butts, and a single guest who lies with his arms crossed over his chest, puffing smoke rings through a whistling hole in his throat."
  
  The bad: Some of the stories are much too short and don't seem to say enough. The shorter it is, the more poignant it should be, in my opinion. Some of these feel like they were written to fill the book, to hit the goal of having 50. It would have been better to have 35 that were good without the filler.
  
  The ugly: His overuse of the word "mist" and similes in general were annoying. His use of simile started as an putrid mist infiltrating my brain but then started throbbing like a hammer into my eyeballs.
• 
  Sharon Bakar

  4+
  
  Found the stories inventive and playful - and often found myself rereading to fully appreciate them, so my progress through the book was necessarily slow. Some of the stories are very short indeed; one of them just two sentences long (though later he weaves these lines into other longer stories - riffs off them). Among my favourite stories the flash piece Fridge in which a couple going to their refrigerator for a midnight snack are confronted by an arctic tundra. Midwife is a very dark and disturbed story about a boy, a doll and a potato. The Kiss is heartbreaking and perfect. I couldn't get Cordoba - about love and passion and the workings of chance - out of my head. Many of the stories feature young lovers and are very sensual and tender; there's lots of teasing pillow-talk. Some of the stories you wish were longer
  
  There's also an improvised, spontaneous quality about the stories in the way they keep taking detours, and yet are so finely worked, the language beautiful and reverberations and echoes in the imagery. The book has left me feeling inspired and wanting to write.
  
  
  
• 
  Michael

  Prior to this book, my only other encounter with Stuart Dybek was his last short story collection, the sublime I Sailed With Magellan. Most, if not all, of these stories have already appeared in various publications, and I'm guessing that a writer of Dybek's stature can get anything he writes published by somebody.
  
  This collection is as disparate as Magellan was unified. There are stories that are one or two paragraph fragments. Some qualify more as verse. Some are really abstract. And while I certainly think it's important for a writer to stretch his or her creative muscles, very few of these offbeat stories do much other than call attention to their oddity.
  
  The more traditional Dybek stories are more hit than miss, but there aren't enough hits among the fifty stories here. When one does crop up, it enthralls while also highlighting the highly variable quality of much of the work here.
  
  Basically, this book was a chore to read, and there wasn't enough pay off for the effort.