The Coast of Chicago: Stories

Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago is a collection of fourteen short stories set deep in the fabric of Chicago’s South Side, as it explores the neighborhood’s ethnic customs, sports teams (especially the 1959 White Sox), and urban adolescent life more generally. Dybek captures the neighborhood’s grittiness at a street level, but his prose is sometimes awkward, often the result of poor word choices or metaphors.