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Chargement... The Coast of Chicago: Stories (1990)par Stuart Dybek
Chicago Books (81) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Coast of Chicago consists of fourteen stories. I read "Blight" and "Hot Ice" for the Challenge. While every short story has well rounded and thoughtful characters, it is the city of Chicago that steals the show. It is the largest personality in every story. Everyone describes Dybek's language as "gritty" and I couldn't agree more. "Blight" Remembering Chicago in the late 50s. "Hot Ice" The legend of the girl frozen in a block of ice ice. A good collection, maybe even great, but ultimately not quite as good as his more recent I Sailed with Magellan. "Pet Milk," "Hot Ice," and "Blight" are all terrific stories, especially "Pet Milk," which is so fucking achingly beautiful that I can hardly stand it. I had some trouble with the interminable "Nighthawks," a story that seemed gimmicky, something Dybek's stories rarely are. I have to confess that I don't really like stories where none of the characters have names, where they all seem to exist in pronoun land. If you're going to do a story like that, keep it to a page or two, a short short. Some people think Dybek's stuff is too sentimental. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old sap, but I love his writing. He conjures that certain part of Chicago in that certain time perfectly. He owns a part of the world, "fictionally" speaking, and it's perfectly rendered. Nostalgic, maybe, but wonderfully so.
"The stolid landscape of Chicago suddenly turns dreamlike and otherworldly in Stuart Dybek's classic story collection. A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers."--Publisher's description. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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I wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, however, and it wasn't--not for me on a first read, at least. This is a book that I imagine gets better upon rereading, but there wasn't enough narrative momentum to make me want to reread the whole book. That said, I know for a fact that I will return to some of the stories as models of beautiful writing. The brevity of so many of the stories makes it a great resource for teaching creative writing. ( )