SOURCE: Klawans, Stuart. “Brief Encounters.” The Village Voice Literary Supplement no. 84 (April 1990): 6.

In the following review, Klawans commends Dybek for his evocative stories.

Stuart Dybek's new book begins with a story titled “Entrance”—an appropriate name, whichever syllable you stress. Though the word refers immediately to the doorway of a three-flat, that fundamental unit of Chicago architecture, what really opens here is memory—the memory of departed people, of places that have changed, of everything that, in vanishing, gains the power to put you under a spell.

The setting, too, is appropriate, since few cities are so well made for hauntings. Vast, gray, matter-of-fact, Chicago seems as unalterable as granite, especially to its children. And yet it is a made-up place, conjured by entrepreneurial whim amid onion fields and intolerable weather, where one day there was nothing but prairie and the next a neighborhood full of European peasants...