Product Description: The poems in this powerful first book have grown from the American urban experience of the last half of this century, a time of decay and diminishing possibilities; they vary from realistic vignettes of working-class Chicago neighborhoods to prose poems elegant and spare in their surrealism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The author of I Sailed with Magellan explores the world of paradox and the borders between the known and the unfamiliar, in a collection of stories set against the colorful and diverse landscape of Chicago. Reprint.

Stories about growing up in urban America during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s have as their setting the streets, alleys, and backyards of Chicago

Product Description: Selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

A collection of eleven short works by the author of The Coast of Chicago is set in the urban areas of Chicago's South Side, where imaginative protagonist Perry Katzek encounters such events as a boy's musical performances on behalf of a drinking uncle, a thug's distraction by multiple ex-girlfriends, and a scheme by two youths to sell stolen flowers to finance a trip to Mexico. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 25,000 first printing

Explores the world of paradox and the borders between the known and the unfamiliar, in a collection of stories. (view table of contents)

Product Description: "Streets in Their Own Ink . . . has a gritty realism infused with a sense of the marvelous." --Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post In a city like that one might sailthrough life led by a runaway hat.The young scattered in whatever directionstheir wild hair pointed and, gustinginto one another, they fell in love...read more

Product Description: Since its founding at Northwestern University in 1964, TriQuarterly has remained one of the most widely admired and important literary magazines in the country. Under the editorial direction of poet Susan Firestone Hahn, TriQuarterly continues to publish the best work of both established and new poets and fiction writers...read more

Product Description: Verb is the ancient oral tradition and the venerable literary magazine combined into a fresh new package: the audioquarterly. The best writers in the country reading their own work--new stories and poems you won’t find anywhere else--and an innovative format with an eye-catching design all come together in this exciting quarterly series...read more

A colorful assortment of photographs captures barrio life in Pilsen, Chicago's largest Mexican neighborhood, and in nearby Little Village, revealing the public and private worlds of the inhabitants of the city's Mexican community.

A new collection of short stories by a master of the form with a common focus on the turmoils of romantic loveReady!Aim!On command the firing squad aims at the man backed against a full-length mirror. The mirror once hung in a bedroom, but now it's cracked and propped against a dumpster in an alley. The condemned man has refused the customary last cigarette but accepted as a hood the black slip that was carelessly tossed over a corner of the mirror's frame. The slip still smells faintly of a familiar fragrance.So begins "Tosca," the first in this vivid collection of Stuart Dybek's love stories. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, "Someone will find you." Some of Dybek's characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they―and we―are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun. "After the ragged discharge," Dybek writes, "when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?" Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America's most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.