Paper Lantern: Love Stories
*Starred Review* Acclaimed for his exquisite and imaginative coming-of-age tales, Dybek has filled Paper Lantern with nine extraordinarily ample, mysterious, and enrapturing stories of incendiary romance and catastrophic longing. Music, a shaping force throughout Dybek’s work, takes center stage in “Tosca” as he cleverly and profoundly dramatizes the consequences of doomed passion and devotion to art in an indifferent world. In “Waiting,” he explores that state of limbo from multiple perspectives as the narrator, a social worker become writer, reflects on Hemingway, suicide, and a disastrous affair. In “Four Deuces,” an exceptionally complex creation, been-through-the-ringer bar owner Rosie tells artist Rafael her life story, a wild and devastating saga of gambling mojo and loss, love and aberration. Then in “The Caller,” we see Rafael caught in a web of imperiled women. The magnificent, far-voyaging fairy tale “Oceanic” pulls in many of Dybek’s signature preoccupations, from the mysteries of the deep to time, the church, Eros, the opposing fears of rejection and of losing one’s self in another, and the transience of beauty and bliss.  In these sexy, surprising, haunting, droll, dreamy, and sorrowful stories, glorious word-by-word and magnificently symphonic, Dybek confronts the radiance and combustibility, fragility and fleetingness of love and life. --Donna Seaman