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Paper Lantern: Love Stories
A new collection of short stories by a master of the form with a common focus on the turmoils of romantic love
Ready!
Aim!
On command the firing squad aims at the man backed against a full-length mirror. The mirror once hung in a bedroom, but now it's cracked and propped against a dumpster in an alley. The condemned man has refused the customary last cigarette but accepted as a hood the black slip that was carelessly tossed over a corner of the mirror's frame. The slip still smells faintly of a familiar fragrance.
So begins "Tosca," the first in this vivid collection of Stuart Dybek's love stories. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, "Someone will find you."
Some of Dybek's characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they—and we—are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun. "After the ragged discharge," Dybek writes, "when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?" Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America's most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.
Ready!
Aim!
On command the firing squad aims at the man backed against a full-length mirror. The mirror once hung in a bedroom, but now it's cracked and propped against a dumpster in an alley. The condemned man has refused the customary last cigarette but accepted as a hood the black slip that was carelessly tossed over a corner of the mirror's frame. The slip still smells faintly of a familiar fragrance.
So begins "Tosca," the first in this vivid collection of Stuart Dybek's love stories. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, "Someone will find you."
Some of Dybek's characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they—and we—are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun. "After the ragged discharge," Dybek writes, "when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?" Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America's most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
37 people are currently reading
1555 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Dybek
64 books216 followersStuart Dybek has published three short story collections: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed With Magellan; and two volumes of poetry: Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. He has been anthologized frequently and regularly appears in magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine and the Paris Review.
He has received numerous awards, including: a 1998 Lannan Award; the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story"; an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship; two fellowships from the NEA; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center; and a Whiting Writers Award. He has also received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story, "Hot Ice." Dybek's story, "Blight," was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature.
Dybek grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Polish-American neighborhood called Pilsen or Little Village, which is also the main setting for his fiction. He received an M.A. in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Western Michigan University when he is not in Chicago.
He has received numerous awards, including: a 1998 Lannan Award; the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story"; an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship; two fellowships from the NEA; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center; and a Whiting Writers Award. He has also received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story, "Hot Ice." Dybek's story, "Blight," was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature.
Dybek grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Polish-American neighborhood called Pilsen or Little Village, which is also the main setting for his fiction. He received an M.A. in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Western Michigan University when he is not in Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
December 29, 2016
It's hard to find fault in any collection of Dybek stories; I've missed his writing and am glad to read more from his pen.
Even if you're not a fan of love stories, don't be fooled by the title - love is the clay to this Potter; watching what he does with the medium is dazzling.
Even if you're not a fan of love stories, don't be fooled by the title - love is the clay to this Potter; watching what he does with the medium is dazzling.
October 18, 2018
[Earlier this year, I had the honor of being asked to join the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, specifically to help choose the honoree each year of the organization's Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2018's recipient was Stuart Dybek, and I was asked to write a critical overview of his work for the accompanying program. I'm reprinting it in full below.]
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history.
It’s been a fascinating thing this month to read through the entire prose oeuvre of Stuart Dybek in chronological order for the first time, as we here on the staff of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame have been making plans for tonight’s ceremony, and have been gathering in the effusive praise from his friends and colleagues you’re reading in this program. Like many, I had read his most famous book, 1990’s The Coast of Chicago, in my twenties soon after it had come out; like many, it was at the urging of a woman I was trying to make into my latest romantic partner, a slam poet and former student of his who told me that "everything I needed to know about her" could be gleaned from the book; and like many, once I did read the book, Dybek’s unforgettable prose took on a life of its own with me, apart from the six bittersweet weeks said woman and I ended up together. (And strangely, like Dybek’s story “Córdoba,” said woman just happened to live at the corner of Buena Avenue and Marine Drive, which made me feel like one of the sweet but hapless male heroes of his pieces when coming across this fact last week.)
But still, I had never explored the rest of his fictional work before this month, so I decided to start with his first, 1980’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Even 38 years later, it’s easy to see with this book why Dybek started gaining a feverish cult following from his very start, because the writing on display is startlingly unique; the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the gritty urbanism of Nelson Algren, the sweet nostalgia of the Saturday Evening Post, but with the naughty subversion of the Countercultural era. (Also, what an astounding historical record of a Chicago that no longer exists, as best typified by the very first story of the book, "The Palatski Man," in which alley-going knife sharpeners on horse-drawn carriages still live in a wild rural wonderland, right in the middle of the city.)
Next came The Coast of Chicago, deservedly now known as a modern classic, one of those magical moments in literary history when everything came together perfectly. An expansion of Dybek’s look back at his childhood as a Polish-American in the Little Village neighborhood (in a post-war time when the area was undergoing a transition into a mostly Mexican neighborhood), it’s also a thoroughly contemporary collection of pieces about masculinity, sexuality, and experience-hungry youth, containing many of the most indelible and heartbreaking stories of his career, such as the aching "Chopin in Winter" where we watch the twin fates of a dying immigrant grandfather and an illegitimately pregnant teenage neighbor. (Also, for those keeping score, this is the book that contains the notorious "Pet Milk," mentioned over and over by his admirers in this program.)
A decade later saw Dybek’s so-far only novel, 2003’s I Sailed with Magellan, although this technically comes with an asterisk for being a "novel in stories," the literary length that he’s destined to be mostly remembered for. A non-linear look at the life of the sometimes infuriating, always engaging Perry Katzek, this is Dybek doing a deep dive into his checkered youth within a rough-and-tumble, pre-gentrification Chicago -- a world of mobsters and viaducts, dead disabled boys turned into Catholic martyrs, broke but striving social workers living in rundown northside SROs, and as always the women beside them who propelled them along, messy mistakes and all. To me, it was my favorite of all his books, and one I know I’ll be coming back to again and again for the rest of my life.
And finally, a decade after that, Dybek gave the world the remarkable gift of 59 new stories in a single year, with the twinned 2014 publications of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. A reflection of Dybek’s years of honing his craft in the academic world, as both a beloved professor and working artist, these pieces are mostly tiny little diamonds from a now master of his craft, fiction that often approaches flash-fiction but that packs all the wallop of stories ten times the size. Split between general stories (Cahoots) and specific love stories (Lantern), these books see Dybek at the absolute top of his game, a crowning achievement to a busy and award-packed career that is about to celebrate its half-century anniversary.
With all the wonderful anecdotes in this program from long-time friends who are intimately acquainted with his work, I’m proud to be one of the few to say that it’s perfectly all right if you’re not familiar yet with all of Stuart Dybek’s books. It is in fact a perfect time to become so, with all of his titles still in print and with a brand-new greatest-hits collection that was just recently published by Jonathan Cape/Vintage. Still as relevant as ever, still as powerful as ever, he is truly one of America’s greatest living authors, and a bright star in the annals of Chicago’s literary history.
February 11, 2012
This was from a New Yorker Podcast, read by ZZ Packer. About forty minutes with an introduction and closing discussion with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, it is thoroughly entertaining, really quite daunting in style and device. I've replayed the reading several times and expect quite a few more.
August 28, 2017
If you enjoy literary fiction, including in short story form, you will love this collection. Stuart Dybek is a very talented, experienced writer and does a fantastic job with both character and place in a relatively few number of pages. These are all love stories in a sense, but each unique. The expressions and types of love are a part of that difference, as is the way the author journeys into the story. His students are very lucky writers, indeed.
July 11, 2014
I've read and loved all of Dybek's books, but nothing prepared me for this. These stories are wild, and different, and strange, and amazing.
October 31, 2014
Definitely disappointed that I did not enjoy this book. With such good reviews, I thought it would be an enjoyable read. Instead, I found myself dragging through it, feeling miserable!
January 27, 2015
Absolutely love Paper Lantern, the story. The rest of the stories here are frankly hard to make sense of on first reading, though they are enchantingly written.
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September 29, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...
Review by Lacey N. Dunham
Stuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern: Love Stories should be sold with a warning: do not read if you’re recovering from recent heartbreak. Or, more properly, if you’ve ever experienced heartbreak. Set mainly in the Midwest, and in particular Dybek’s beloved Chicago, he writes head on about the city’s poor and working class with the same ease as he examines the inner lives of over-educated academics. Each of the nine stories in the collection is about love the way that Romeo and Juliet is about love — sure, men and women fall for each other, but after the sparks and sex, things fall apart. In Dybek’s world, everyone more or less survives, at least in the metaphysical sense, though it speaks to the understated complexity of his stories whether surviving heartbreak is worth it.
The decline of love in Dybek’s collection can be swift, as in “Waiting,” which opens with a reflection on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and goes on to address waiting in other literary works from Melville to Joyce, before always returning to Hemingway’s elegiac stories. Dybek weaves “Waiting” with these meditations while flipping between Jack’s current relationship with Lise and his flawed, complicated relationship with Felice, a woman we meet in “Seiche,” one of the collection’s strongest pieces. In “Waiting,” we know Jack’s relationship with Lise isn’t sustainable — the Hemingway is a dead giveaway — and we watch as the two adults carefully dance around each other’s vulnerabilities and hopes while we simultaneously wait for the crash. In “Seiche,” however, Jack is a younger man and his love for Nisa, a Lebanese student, burns the page with the ache of yearning and the tragedy of a first love, here rendered poignant because Nisa, after boarding a plane to return to war-torn Beirut for her grandfather’s funeral, disappears, vanishing from Jack’s life and the second half of the story. Her conspicuous absence acknowledges a large truth, though, about how our greatest loves never quite relinquish their hold on our hearts.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...
Review by Lacey N. Dunham
Stuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern: Love Stories should be sold with a warning: do not read if you’re recovering from recent heartbreak. Or, more properly, if you’ve ever experienced heartbreak. Set mainly in the Midwest, and in particular Dybek’s beloved Chicago, he writes head on about the city’s poor and working class with the same ease as he examines the inner lives of over-educated academics. Each of the nine stories in the collection is about love the way that Romeo and Juliet is about love — sure, men and women fall for each other, but after the sparks and sex, things fall apart. In Dybek’s world, everyone more or less survives, at least in the metaphysical sense, though it speaks to the understated complexity of his stories whether surviving heartbreak is worth it.
The decline of love in Dybek’s collection can be swift, as in “Waiting,” which opens with a reflection on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and goes on to address waiting in other literary works from Melville to Joyce, before always returning to Hemingway’s elegiac stories. Dybek weaves “Waiting” with these meditations while flipping between Jack’s current relationship with Lise and his flawed, complicated relationship with Felice, a woman we meet in “Seiche,” one of the collection’s strongest pieces. In “Waiting,” we know Jack’s relationship with Lise isn’t sustainable — the Hemingway is a dead giveaway — and we watch as the two adults carefully dance around each other’s vulnerabilities and hopes while we simultaneously wait for the crash. In “Seiche,” however, Jack is a younger man and his love for Nisa, a Lebanese student, burns the page with the ache of yearning and the tragedy of a first love, here rendered poignant because Nisa, after boarding a plane to return to war-torn Beirut for her grandfather’s funeral, disappears, vanishing from Jack’s life and the second half of the story. Her conspicuous absence acknowledges a large truth, though, about how our greatest loves never quite relinquish their hold on our hearts.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/08/r...
July 1, 2014
Dybek's lush lyrical language, control of the image, and his willingness to take flights into the fantastic make this a delightful collection of stories that becomes more a meditation on love, art (and the art of love), desire and the role of story in this thing we call being human.
June 19, 2016
I'm so happy that it's over! None of these short stories caught my attention. I was really close to throwing this book across my room. I feel bad since a friend of mine recommend Stuart Dyberk. I'm going to give him another chance and read another book.
September 21, 2014
5 stars for the lush brilliance of stories such as Paper Lantern. 3 stars for about half of the stories, which had perfect moments but ultimately didn't work for me
April 5, 2020
So hard to evaluate story collections without just rehashing the individual plots. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed this one, like I have with all of Dybek’s books.
July 9, 2017
"I realized we can never predict when these few, special moments will occur...How, if we hadn't met, I wouldn't be standing on a bridge, watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one's life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that's what falling in love means - the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves."
-from the story "Paper Lanterns"
This book is aptly subtitled "Love Stories," but also, they're all stories about memories, and love being a fiery defining light only as you view its course from the distant present. Maybe these are the most cutting love stories - the ones that are over, but you still feel years afterward?
-from the story "Paper Lanterns"
This book is aptly subtitled "Love Stories," but also, they're all stories about memories, and love being a fiery defining light only as you view its course from the distant present. Maybe these are the most cutting love stories - the ones that are over, but you still feel years afterward?
Read
November 10, 2024Given that the title story, "Paper Lantern," has long been one of my favorites, I can't believe I did not know this book existed for a decade (published 2014). The stories here are roughly conceived of being similar in mood, tone and form to the exceedingly weird (or weirdly structured) "Paper Lantern," that is, they tend to a recursive and ruminative nostalgic form. Well, interesting. This does not always work. Also a hard no on the phrase "her pendulous breasts jouncing" -- nonononono. I read with curiosity but without much pleasure and left feeling like I would not want to end up stuck in an elevator with the author. Sorry. "Paper Lantern" itself remains its mysterious self, but the best of an odd lot.
May 12, 2019
Nine short stories previously published in magazines between 1995 and 2012. Although subtitled love stories they might more accurately be described as fictional nostalgic reminisces of erotic encounters that didn’t work out so well for the participants. Most are set in Chicago.
Dybek’s style is littered with allusions to other works of literature, painting, opera, cinema, and popular culture. This in not to say that it’s not skillful or literary; it very much abounds in these techniques. However, for me, this occasionally, got in the way of the story, especially in the stories, “Tosca” and “Oceanic.”
Dybek’s style is littered with allusions to other works of literature, painting, opera, cinema, and popular culture. This in not to say that it’s not skillful or literary; it very much abounds in these techniques. However, for me, this occasionally, got in the way of the story, especially in the stories, “Tosca” and “Oceanic.”
September 15, 2025
Stuart Dybek is a master of the short story. I return to the title story, “Paper Lantern,” often. So much heart and knowing.
“‘I realized we can never predict when those few, special moments will occur,’ she says. ‘How, if we hadn’t met, I wouldn’t be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means - the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”
“‘I realized we can never predict when those few, special moments will occur,’ she says. ‘How, if we hadn’t met, I wouldn’t be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means - the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”
March 3, 2020
Wonderful book of stories! Astonishingly under rated and under appreciated. A literary classic and a great read. Varied stylistically. Dybek doesn't publish many books. I'd wish he would, but I'm grateful that he spends the time to make them good. I intend to reread it, even though time doesn't allow me to read all the great books coming out. I realize it isn't for everyone. The reasons for the lower ratings are understandable. I think I've said enough to reach many who should read it.
November 30, 2023
“I had this sudden awareness,' she continues, 'of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.”
August 13, 2014
Here is my review of PAPER LANTERN from the San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July, 2014
Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 207 pages, $24.00
Ecstatic Cahoots by Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pages, $15.00
REVIEWED BY VALERIE MINER
June is a great month to celebrate fiction with the publication of Stuart Dybek’s two effervescent, musical collections, Paper Lantern, nine love stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots, fifty short-short stories. His characters explore urban Chicago and the edges of Lake Michigan as they muse about weather, sex, romance and the multiple meanings of life. Author of three previous story collections and two books of poetry, Dybek, at 72, isn’t the most prolific of writers, but he is among the most acclaimed, with fellowships and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA as well as a Lannan Award, a Whiting Award, the O’Henry Prize and the PEN/Malamud Prize.
Dybek’s upbringing in Chicago’s South West Side, a multi-ethnic blue collar community, fuels these pieces as do this Catholic education and his passion for jazz. He uses childhood memories as well as adult experiences as a social worker, teacher and long-time professor. The stories are discursive, often spirals or circles, braiding realism, fantasy and lyricism.
The title story in Paper Lantern describes three colleagues leaving their lab for supper at a fabled local café, the Chinese Laundry, a former washing establishment whose only concession to dining décor is a red paper lantern. Over dessert, one asks, “Say, did anyone turn off the Bunsen burner…” 195 The color red threads through the tale as they share a blood orange under the lantern light and worry about fire. Back at the lab, they discover, “Flames occupy the top floor….through radiant, buckling windows, we can see the mannequins from the dressmaker’s showroom. Naked, wigs on fire, they appear to gyrate lewdly before they topple.” 195
As the narrator watches the lab’s conflagration, he recalls a lover he once photographed staring at a big blaze along a Chicago River. His ten page digression into sexual passion and automotive danger comprises two-thirds of the story, which eventually takes us back to the ruined lab. “The wind gusts, fanning the bitter chill of night even as it fans the flames, and instinctively we all edge closer to the fire.” 207
“Four Deuces” introduces Rosie and Frank, gamblers who buy a tavern from Verman the German. They have big dreams of fixing it up and turning into a popular, profitable watering hole. “We put up an old Solidarność poster and a picture of the Polish Pope next to Mayor Daley. Frank figured immigrants want a little of the homeland, so we put in Żywiec on tap…” 73 Rosie and Frank are luckier at the track than in domestic life. Infidelity, desertion, violence and retribution drive the hot, humid and snowy, cold novella as Rose breathlessly relates her saga about “sumnabitch” Frank to a customer at the bar.
Dybek is an erudite man who conveys his wide-ranging intelligence in a pleasingly common language. He finds beauty in loss as well as in communion. Both new books reveal a taste for the wild and ridiculous. Despite his penchant for metafiction, the story structures here are more organic than engineered and his dramas are driven by feeling rather than by idea. Dybek’s tone ranges from melancholic to sardonic to hilarious to bitter to nostalgic to deceptively indifferent.
Ecstatic Cahoots is the perfect title for his micro-fictions, which range from two lines to ten pages. Some, like the Hopperesque “Inland Sea,” read like prose poems.
“Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it to a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.” 186
The comical and wrenching, “Ravenswood,” portrays a nun hijacking a streetcar. 91 “‘I’m not in the habit of doing this,’ the Nun says from behind him. …she knocks him silly with a blow from her missal. …the Conductor finds himself hanging from a hand strap toward the rear of the streetcar. The rosary binds his wrists. He’s dressed…in the Nun’s black robes; her sensible shoes, untied, pinch his feet.” 91 As the streetcar reels forward, the conductor is lurched into deep introspection. “…he’d taken being a conductor for granted, treated it merely as a job, an identity he stripped off with the uniform, when, dear God!, it was his life.” 94
In “Flu,” Faye, recently returned from sick leave, is noticed for the first time by Aldo. “And later, when people would ask how they met and fell in love, it was always Aldo who would answer, ‘Flu.’ He’d smile earnestly. ‘It all started with the flu.’” 69
Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern confirm Dybek as a virtuoso of the short story—a nimble, compassionate writer who uses precise, lucid, original descriptions. He shows us all we need to know and nothing more.
END
Valerie Miner is the author of fourteen books including her new novel, Traveling with Spirits. She teaches at Stanford University and her website is www.valerieminer.com.
Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 207 pages, $24.00
Ecstatic Cahoots by Stuart Dybek
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 195 pages, $15.00
REVIEWED BY VALERIE MINER
June is a great month to celebrate fiction with the publication of Stuart Dybek’s two effervescent, musical collections, Paper Lantern, nine love stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots, fifty short-short stories. His characters explore urban Chicago and the edges of Lake Michigan as they muse about weather, sex, romance and the multiple meanings of life. Author of three previous story collections and two books of poetry, Dybek, at 72, isn’t the most prolific of writers, but he is among the most acclaimed, with fellowships and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA as well as a Lannan Award, a Whiting Award, the O’Henry Prize and the PEN/Malamud Prize.
Dybek’s upbringing in Chicago’s South West Side, a multi-ethnic blue collar community, fuels these pieces as do this Catholic education and his passion for jazz. He uses childhood memories as well as adult experiences as a social worker, teacher and long-time professor. The stories are discursive, often spirals or circles, braiding realism, fantasy and lyricism.
The title story in Paper Lantern describes three colleagues leaving their lab for supper at a fabled local café, the Chinese Laundry, a former washing establishment whose only concession to dining décor is a red paper lantern. Over dessert, one asks, “Say, did anyone turn off the Bunsen burner…” 195 The color red threads through the tale as they share a blood orange under the lantern light and worry about fire. Back at the lab, they discover, “Flames occupy the top floor….through radiant, buckling windows, we can see the mannequins from the dressmaker’s showroom. Naked, wigs on fire, they appear to gyrate lewdly before they topple.” 195
As the narrator watches the lab’s conflagration, he recalls a lover he once photographed staring at a big blaze along a Chicago River. His ten page digression into sexual passion and automotive danger comprises two-thirds of the story, which eventually takes us back to the ruined lab. “The wind gusts, fanning the bitter chill of night even as it fans the flames, and instinctively we all edge closer to the fire.” 207
“Four Deuces” introduces Rosie and Frank, gamblers who buy a tavern from Verman the German. They have big dreams of fixing it up and turning into a popular, profitable watering hole. “We put up an old Solidarność poster and a picture of the Polish Pope next to Mayor Daley. Frank figured immigrants want a little of the homeland, so we put in Żywiec on tap…” 73 Rosie and Frank are luckier at the track than in domestic life. Infidelity, desertion, violence and retribution drive the hot, humid and snowy, cold novella as Rose breathlessly relates her saga about “sumnabitch” Frank to a customer at the bar.
Dybek is an erudite man who conveys his wide-ranging intelligence in a pleasingly common language. He finds beauty in loss as well as in communion. Both new books reveal a taste for the wild and ridiculous. Despite his penchant for metafiction, the story structures here are more organic than engineered and his dramas are driven by feeling rather than by idea. Dybek’s tone ranges from melancholic to sardonic to hilarious to bitter to nostalgic to deceptively indifferent.
Ecstatic Cahoots is the perfect title for his micro-fictions, which range from two lines to ten pages. Some, like the Hopperesque “Inland Sea,” read like prose poems.
“Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it to a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.” 186
The comical and wrenching, “Ravenswood,” portrays a nun hijacking a streetcar. 91 “‘I’m not in the habit of doing this,’ the Nun says from behind him. …she knocks him silly with a blow from her missal. …the Conductor finds himself hanging from a hand strap toward the rear of the streetcar. The rosary binds his wrists. He’s dressed…in the Nun’s black robes; her sensible shoes, untied, pinch his feet.” 91 As the streetcar reels forward, the conductor is lurched into deep introspection. “…he’d taken being a conductor for granted, treated it merely as a job, an identity he stripped off with the uniform, when, dear God!, it was his life.” 94
In “Flu,” Faye, recently returned from sick leave, is noticed for the first time by Aldo. “And later, when people would ask how they met and fell in love, it was always Aldo who would answer, ‘Flu.’ He’d smile earnestly. ‘It all started with the flu.’” 69
Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern confirm Dybek as a virtuoso of the short story—a nimble, compassionate writer who uses precise, lucid, original descriptions. He shows us all we need to know and nothing more.
END
Valerie Miner is the author of fourteen books including her new novel, Traveling with Spirits. She teaches at Stanford University and her website is www.valerieminer.com.
February 25, 2018
a nice collection
dybek is a great visual wordsmith, with creative exciting imaginative word usage and analogies and twists and turns, as much as there are in literary fiction, but his storytelling is a bit loose, and doesnt grab me
his word choice and descriptions are always amazing tho
good overall collection
might be better if i knew what love was, haha
dybek is a great visual wordsmith, with creative exciting imaginative word usage and analogies and twists and turns, as much as there are in literary fiction, but his storytelling is a bit loose, and doesnt grab me
his word choice and descriptions are always amazing tho
good overall collection
might be better if i knew what love was, haha
June 22, 2022
love! imagination! jumping onto a narrator's train of thought without knowing at all where it's going!
I heard a reading of the eponymous story on The New Yorker podcast and fell into amours with Dybek's style. I was not disappointed upon reading the full collection and have really appreciated seeing his style played out in different ways and across different stories.
I heard a reading of the eponymous story on The New Yorker podcast and fell into amours with Dybek's style. I was not disappointed upon reading the full collection and have really appreciated seeing his style played out in different ways and across different stories.
October 23, 2017
Really interesting stories . creative and make you pause. I really loved Ecstatic Cahoots and how imaginative those stories were. it's hard to compete with that. But these are great pre bedtime reads too.
August 25, 2018
Great set of stories by a master. At his best, Dybek infuses his work with an intriguing, understated mystery that sets them apart. This book could serve as a textbook on how to write short stories. Each tale is as fragile and fleeting as the title suggests.
September 12, 2018
This collection was frequently overthought and overwrought but had two moments of pure magic: the surreal wanderings of Oceanic, and the perfect morsel of a titular story (although Paper Lantern is best consumed not in the book, but rather as read by ZZ Packer on the New Yorker Fiction podcast).
February 23, 2021
An interesting collection of stories about different types of love. Sometimes the stories feel connected, with similar characters running through them.There's a lot of flashbacks where the main character in the story flashes back after being reminded by an object or an event in current life.
Read
May 14, 2023So the title story (which is the only one of this collection that I’ve read so far - though I may give one or two others a try) was ok; it’s not that it was poorly written or anything, but it just didn’t do anything for me.
A LitHub May is short story month selection.
A LitHub May is short story month selection.
July 30, 2023
Amazing set of short stories exploring time, control/surrender, memories, love, Among other things. There are some interesting parallels between some stories and just great writing, some good dialogues.
June 18, 2017
A collection of short stories that felt like nine punches in the gut. I mean this in a good way.
Read
August 30, 2017The only story worth reading was the one featured in the New Yorker Fiction podcast.
January 27, 2021
My favorite short fiction book
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