Ecstatic Cahoots

April 28, 2014
A roller coaster of realist and fantastical scenes, slice-of-life character sketches, and page-long fables, Dybek’s collection of flash fiction jostles from story to story like a streamlined zephyr. Much of the book feels like snippets of conversation, or fights overheard through an apartment wall. The daughter with her mother’s bellowing voice who sings only in dreams; the bumbling supervisor lured into paying for a night with his employee; the woman who wants to shave her boyfriend: “ ‘Sounds nice,’ he said, rather than tell her there was no way in hell she was getting near him with a razor.” Dybek switches easily from humor to sadness, from the sensual to the surreal. A young man must leave his girlfriend to find his way home through a blizzard in “Córdoba.” In “Ant,” a lovely day for two lovers is pulled apart by an ant that manages to cart the man away after he remembers a story read to him in childhood by his uncle. In “A Confluence of Doors,” a castaway on the ocean comes upon a veritable island of locked, knocking doors. In “Ice,” a couple brave out onto a frozen pond, the location of a past wedding party where the bride and groom drowned, their ghostly figures still visible under the sheet of ice. Dybek uses all his creative muscle in these brief stories, which are both elusive and precise.

June 1, 2014
Sure, this new collection of brief fiction by MacArthur Fellow and writer's writer Dybek is a miscellany, a grab bag.Some of the 50 stories collected here, ranging in length from two lines to 13 pages, first appeared in print decades ago; and some of them, fragments and one-offs, seem a bit thin. But the best of them-for instance, "The Start of Something" and the bizarre and whimsical "Ravenswood," in which a nun knocks a streetcar conductor cold and embarks on a kind of joy ride-are quirky miniature masterpieces. There are few if any American short story writers who have the same gift for cityscapes, and especially for capturing on the one hand the loneliness of the lovelorn urban dweller and on the other hand the urban dweller in love's sense of living in a densely packed solitude, in a world consisting only and blessedly of two. Few writers can command the apparently autobiographical first person with such finesse and with such daring; few attempt such a variety of apparently loose, shambling and discursive-but in fact sturdily built-structures.Dybek is especially a master of the ways in which lovers, creating a kind of privacy in public, feel that they are, in a title phrase he borrows from The Great Gatsby, in "ecstatic cahoots"-both with each other and, fleetingly, with the world in which they roam, a world that can seem in such moments as if it were built only for them.

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Starred review from April 1, 2014
The ripple effect of Dybek's ravishing stories of grit and transcendence flows from Chicago, his hometown and creative epicenter, around the world, holding readers spellbound. After earning major awards (a MacArthur fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Prize, four O. Henry Prizes) for his three previous short story collections and two books of poetry, Dybek steps forward, 11 years after his last book of fiction, I Sailed with Magellan (2003), with two virtuoso story collections. The intriguing title, Ecstatic Cahoots, from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, provides an enticing theme for Dybek to improvise upon with intrepid imagination in a great archipelago of stories, some startlingly compact, others mesmerizingly expansive, most involving risky sexual liaisons. Dybek's women are daring, secretive, and elusive; his men are enthralled, wary, and lonely. Rain, snow, ice, and mist complicate trysts and amplify ardor. Lyrical and erotic tales of doomed love alternate with fabulist stories saturated with metaphor and meaning and featuring clothing with strange powers, a mistreated boy's relationship with a pair of tiny newlyweds with frosting on their feet, a flying streetcar, and a man adrift at sea who encounters a gigantic puzzle of floating doors. Dybek writes of desire and mystery, ecstasy and terror with rhapsodic intensity and sensuous provocation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)