SOURCE: A review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, in The New York Times Book Review, February 24, 1980, pp. 14-15.

In the following review, Gold praises the stories in Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

This is a collection of stories about coming of age in Chicago. Stuart Dybek's title struck me as a trifle coy, until I had finished the book. By then Childhood and Other Neighborhoods had come to seem as apt as any of the startling observations and sharp images that distinguish these 11 tales of growing up poor and American and urban in the middle decades of the 20th century. Mr. Dybek grounds his stories in the city's streets and alleys, in the feel his young children and adolescents have for the neighborhood landscapes of their early years, and then bends his flair for naturalism on an anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent...