Nineteen tales of growing up, wising up and falling in love Spanning more than three decades of prize-winning work By a North American master of the short story What are you waiting for? Welcome to the world of Stuart Dybek, where lovelorn adolescents rub shoulders with hard-boiled gangsters and scarf-clad babushkas jostle for attention among jaded academics. Where memory collides with imagination. And where seduction is the order of the day. With an impeccable ear for the language of the streets, Dybek has rightly been heralded as one of Chicago’s foremost chroniclers. But The Start of Something reveals a writer who has simultaneously dedicated his career to a more ambitious project – exploring the art of the short story from every angle. By turn sexy and violent, funny and poignant, the stories in this definitive introduction to a lifetime’s work let you discover what those in the know have long been saying: Stuart Dybek is essential reading.
Author
Stuart 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.
