Stuart Dybek has published one collection of poems, Brass Knuckles (1979), and two collections of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990). Dybek's readers admire the power, humor, storytelling virtuosity, and the sheer strangeness and mysteriousness of his work, in which the setting is usually Chicago. Reviewer Alice Bloom, writing about the 1986 paperback edition of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, said of "these brilliant moving stories," set in Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods, that "no one has done it better, and maybe never will" (Hudson Review, Summer 1987). Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times (20 April 1990), noted that several stories in The Coast of Chicago "introduce us to characters who want to take up permanent residence in our minds.... They persuasively conjure up a fictional world that is both ordinary and amazing."

Dybek has won several awards, including a 1985 Whiting Writers Award (he was one of the first...