SOURCE: Adams, Phoebe Lou. “Short Reviews.” Atlantic Monthly 245 (February 1980): 95.

In the following review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, Adams suggests that Dybek's stories contain both morals and “precise” narratives.

As the title suggests, children occupy most of the stories in this volume. Lest that fact make potential readers wary, it should be noted that these tales in no way resemble the narcissistic “sensitive young man” stories that are the staples of many literary magazines and of writers' workshops everywhere. Dybek is an original.

The landscape of the book is a stylized, half-fantastic version of ethnic Chicago, full of eerie, secret regions oblivious to the city around them: a remote dump where a strange army of ragmen camp, a series of back streets nicknamed “the Alley of Heartaches,” a railroad bridge known as “the Black Angel.” For Dybek's children and young adolescents this is truly an underground, and their...