SOURCE: “Ploughshares Bookshelf.” Ploughshares 17, no. 1 (spring 1991): 228-29.

In the following review of The Coast of Chicago, Lee praises Dybek's ability to draw contrasts together, mingling past with future and grim realism with the mythic.

Readers of literary magazines and anthologies frequently speak of Stuart Dybek's stories with reverence, and they will certainly covet The Coast of Chicago, his second collection, which brings together several works already deemed classics: “Hot Ice,” “Blight,” and “Pet Milk.” Seven long stories are interleaved with seven shorter ones, and they are bound so tightly by place and theme, the book merits, for once, the flap-copy comparisons to Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Joyce's Dubliners.

Dybek's style often shifts from a gritty realism befitting the Chicago's South Side to metafictional techniques which transform images into reverie, the tangible into the mythic. Nothing could be more appropriate, since this is a book about trying to bridge...