SOURCE: Lee, Don. “About Stuart Dybek: A Profile by Don Lee.” Ploughshares 24, no. 1 (spring 1998): 192-98.

In the following essay, Lee offers an overview of Dybek's career as a short story writer.

Stuart Dybek works with a curious mix of spontaneity and retentiveness. He wrote most of the stories for his first collection, for instance, under a spell. He'd put on Eastern European classical music, and the words would simply pour out. To this day, Dybek relies on music for inspiration, listening to jazz, jotting in a notebook, improvising, not knowing or caring if the lines will beget a poem or a short-short or a novella. Yet he can be superstitious and fussy—a perfectionist. He is reluctant to analyze or even discuss his ongoing projects, fearing he might “talk away a story,” and he has not published another book since his second collection in 1990, although he has four...