SOURCE: Kubal, David. “Fiction Chronicle.” The Hudson Review 33, no. 3 (autumn 1980): 445-47.

In the below review, Kubal praises the unconventionality of Dybek's “magical grotesques” collected in Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, but notes that Dybek may be attempting to raise the mundane world to the mythic, at the expense of a serious exploration of reality.

In Stuart Dybek's first book [Childhood and Other Neighborhoods], a group of eleven uncanny stories about childhood and adolescence, we encounter a world radically different from Miss Beattie's or Mr. Vivante's. It is the Southwest side of Chicago during the 1940s, fifties, and sixties, a Slavic neighborhood gradually being overtaken by Blacks and Spanish. It is also a harsh and repulsive section of the city, which the author's singular imagination nonetheless enchants, transforming it into a world of magical grotesques. With its antecedents in Russian, and, perhaps, in Yiddish literature (one is sometimes reminded of...