Paper Lantern

April 28, 2014
Deception and desire drive the love-crossed characters of Dybek’s (I Sailed With Magellan) aptly titled collection of stories. Like much of his previous work, most of these stories—while not explicitly connected—are set in Chicago and circle similar core themes. The coast is a place of reflection and renewal for a boy with a homemade kite in “Blowing Shades,” and for a caseworker awaiting a giant wave on Lake Michigan in “Seiche.” Other stories focus on brief but passionate relationships. “Waiting” tells of a tryst between a poet consumed with the idea of “waiting” in Hemingway and a Hyde Park graduate student in love with a compulsive collector. “Four Deuces,” the longest story in the collection, is a monologue spoken by a woman to a painter at a bar she used to own. Full of energy and spite, she tells of how she bought the bar after a lucky streak at the horse track, and of how her gambling, layabout boyfriend eventually lost it: “I was too goddamn dumb to tell the difference between love and superstition.” The next story, “The Caller,” is written from the perspective of the same painter. A phone rings endlessly in his empty apartment, his walls spray painted with portraits of his many lovers, all of them trying to call after his sudden disappearance. Employing a range of voices that pulse with intensity, this collection delves into the gray areas of love.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
The nine stories gathered here have appeared, scattered across two decades, in the most prestigious American outlets for short fiction; they make for a remarkably unified and consistent collection.That's in part due to the fact that Dybek is a writer whose characteristic subjects (especially erotic love and the twinned joy and scourge of nostalgia) and settings (especially Chicago) have remained startlingly consistent-perhaps "obsessive" would be more accurate-over the decades of his career. Impressively, those themes have retained their holds on his imagination for the most part without hardening into tics or devolving into tiredness. A few of these stories-most notably the volume's longest piece, "Four Deuces," and "The Caller"-don't quite take fire, but others rank with the best of Dybek's excellent body of work. Among the conspicuous successes are a few fictions-the title story, "Oceanic" and "Tosca"-in which Dybek employs a loose-limbed, digressive structure akin to that of a tone poem. He does so not only without sacrificing narrative momentum, but in a way that, surprisingly, quickens and reinvigorates that momentum. At times, these stories read almost as parodies of the au courant in American fiction: "Paper Lantern" starts with a flamboyant frame featuring a time machine and a fire and then doubles back, for fully three-quarters of its length, to Dybek's beloved old territory and mode...to a richly detailed and sexually charged memory of decades before. It's a reverie that constitutes and provides its own-and Dybek's preferred-sort of time travel.A very fine book from a gifted practitioner of the short story form.

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Starred review from April 1, 2014
Acclaimed for his exquisite and imaginative coming-of-age tales, Dybek has filled Paper Lantern with nine extraordinarily ample, mysterious, and enrapturing stories of incendiary romance and catastrophic longing. Music, a shaping force throughout Dybek's work, takes center stage in Tosca as he cleverly and profoundly dramatizes the consequences of doomed passion and devotion to art in an indifferent world. In Waiting, he explores that state of limbo from multiple perspectives as the narrator, a social worker become writer, reflects on Hemingway, suicide, and a disastrous affair. In Four Deuces, an exceptionally complex creation, been-through-the-ringer bar owner Rosie tells artist Rafael her life story, a wild and devastating saga of gambling mojo and loss, love and aberration. Then in The Caller, we see Rafael caught in a web of imperiled women. The magnificent, far-voyaging fairy tale Oceanic pulls in many of Dybek's signature preoccupations, from the mysteries of the deep to time, the church, Eros, the opposing fears of rejection and of losing one's self in another, and the transience of beauty and bliss. In these sexy, surprising, haunting, droll, dreamy, and sorrowful stories, glorious word-by-word and magnificently symphonic, Dybek confronts the radiance and combustibility, fragility and fleetingness of love and life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014

Dybek is a real writer's writer who has accumulated numerous honors, including the PEN/Malamud Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and four O. Henry prizes--that last one certainly boding well for this collection.

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