SOURCE: A review of The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek.Antioch Review 48, no. 4 (fall 1990): 545.

In the following review, the critic compares Dybek's work to that of Hemingway.

In 14 interlocked stories and vivid “short shorts” reminiscent of Hemingway's stark interludes in In Our Time, Dybek writes of a richly remembered Chicago of boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood. Dreamlike and phantasmagoric, his stories remain paradoxically vivid and realistic. Creatures of the night, his characters are apparitions, luminescent reflections and shadows who inhabit a rain-streaked, surreal city of memories and ghosts, of vanished ethnic neighborhoods and mournfully twisting, Kafkaesque streets leading nowhere. Dybek creates an eerie portrait of a vanished Chicago, populated by denizens as hauntingly spectral as those in Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, which provides the title for one of his finest series of stories.