Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories
*Starred Review* The ripple effect of Dybek’s ravishing stories of grit and transcendence flows from Chicago, his hometown and creative epicenter, around the world, holding readers spellbound. After earning major awards (a MacArthur fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Prize, four O. Henry Prizes) for his three previous short story collections and two books of poetry, Dybek steps forward, 11 years after his last book of fiction, I Sailed with Magellan (2003), with two virtuoso story collections. The intriguing title, Ecstatic Cahoots, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, provides an enticing theme for Dybek to improvise upon with intrepid imagination in a great archipelago of stories, some startlingly compact, others mesmerizingly expansive, most involving risky sexual liaisons. Dybek’s women are daring, secretive, and elusive; his men are enthralled, wary, and lonely. Rain, snow, ice, and mist complicate trysts and amplify ardor. Lyrical and erotic tales of doomed love alternate with fabulist stories saturated with metaphor and meaning and featuring clothing with strange powers, a mistreated boy’s relationship with a pair of tiny newlyweds with frosting on their feet, a flying streetcar, and a man adrift at sea who encounters a “gigantic puzzle” of floating doors. Dybek writes of desire and mystery, ecstasy and terror with rhapsodic intensity and sensuous provocation. --Donna Seaman