Lovely stories that take place in the intersection of dream and waking life, stories you'll want to read again and again from one of the most original and lyrical writers working today.

Stuart Dybek is truly a gifted writer. But moving beyond my humble opinion, this unique collection of short stories shines. Dybek's prose is haunting, his language at times startling and spare, at others languid and nearly musical. His characters are alive and absolutely believable in their mistakes and victories. Each story stands as a reflection on everyday beauty; Dybek that takes time to notice the details other authors overlook or dismiss as mundane. In 'The Coast of Chicago' Stuart Dybek has managed to do something quite rare in the all-too self-conscious realm of short story writing-- create stories that are rich yet still real without trying too hard to be so. Allow yourself to get sucked up into the twisting paths of his Chicago-- it's a journey you won't regret.

Dybek is one of those few writers whose work finds rare common ground between comic naturalism and tragic myth. The language of his stories honors the special poetry of the working class -- a poetry elastic enough to range from street slang to high diction, and from cynicism to a stubborn innocence that approaches the heroic (a touch of Damon Runyan at the one end, a mythic reach at the other). His characters struggle with their hearts and minds in ways that are fresh and original, without giving the sense that Dybek is contriving to keep them so. He is the genuine article, a natural myth-maker with an empathy large enough to let his characters behave badly without trying either to condemn or justify them. Dybek seems awed and enthralled by his world, deeply attentive to its particulars, on the lookout for magic but not desperate for it, with a richness of vision that makes his mythic Chicago echo loudly with the voices of the world at large. A wonderful writer.

This is my favorite collection of short stories by any contemporary author. Stories like "Blood Soup" contain bizarre, unforgettable characters and the author's unique, horrified yet loving view of Chicago mainly through the eyes of children. The neo-gothic setting of the "city of big shoulders" (as Carl Sandburg put it) is a perfect backdrop to stories of love, violence, and growing up.

This collection from Bottom Dog Press is excellent for anyone who's been looking for a good college-text to get students talking about literature and work. In these stories, students will find their fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, and even themselves. Literature about work provides a rich opportunity for discussion and learning, and this book is definetely rich in its potential. Bret Comar's story is especially breath-taking.

For Judith Slater Old Scratch lies in the trivial. Slater has written a volume of carefully crafted short stories with a cutting humor about seemingly trivial moments in characters lives that gradually expose the fragility of their hopes and the fleetingness of their satisfaction in live. Not to say that these are nihilistic stories, although in their simple flat sentences and carefully modulated first person voices the subject matter of couples and therapists and waitresses this books does hearken back to the eighties and that nasty word minimalism. Slater's book reminds me a lot of Anne Beattie. Slater's characters emerge as complex, contradictory portraits, in spite of the sometimes too good to be true situations. In "The Bride's Lover" the bride hires an ex-boyfriend to photograph her wedding. In "Glass House," a businessman has an affair with a visiting artist at his daughter's school. His agoraphobic wife will not leave the glass house until an Oregon storm bursts the transparent walls.

"David Morning" represented, to me, the center piece of the collection, another seemingly slice of live story with a series of deft reversals and unexpected developments. The narrator spends weekends at her friends house often playing Trivial Pursuit and just hanging out. She thinks of her friends as evenhanded and happy and herself as slightly removed. Over a game of Trivial Pursuit she thinks she might have something going with David Morning. However, that relationship sort of fails without Trivial Pursuit and she finds another boyfriend whom she finally marries. From a distance she is able to see her friends and realizes while she was feeling sorry for her isolation and that night after playing Trivial Pursuit with David Morning that they may not have been thinking about her at all, but had their own lives going on. This story turns on playing this party game (something designed I think to fill in the gap with strangers getting to know each other, a conversation starter kit) and captures all that is admirable in a realistic story -- a world, a way of life, an accurate and unexpected way of looking at the world, a way of finding value in the seemingly trivial pursuits of daily life.

This isn't a bigass collection that will make you necessarily eagerly hunt out Judith Slater's stories in literary quarterlies but as a collection The Baby Can Sing was a pleasure to read, seductive and valuable and inspires confidence that realistic, slice of life fiction has survived the backlash against the 1980s era of stilted, cardboard imitations.

I loved Judith Slater's short story collection, especially the stories "Water Witch" and "The Bride's Lover." All the stories are different in their approach and structure, but all are intellectually and emotionally moving, all deal with the internal landscape of the characters in surprising yet true ways. The prose is wonderful--very engaging and original, yet also very smooth to read. You know you're in the hands of a master storyteller, and the payoff is always substantial and rewarding. I'm looking forward to Slater's next effort.