SOURCE: A review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, in The Hudson Review. Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1980, pp. 445-47.

In the following excerpt, Kubal states that Dybek's Childhood and Other Stories contains "stories of vigorous and brilliant unconventionality.

In Stuart Dybek's first book, a group of eleven uncanny stories about childhood and adolescence, we encounter a world radically different from Miss Beattie's or Mr. Vivante's. It is the Southwest side of Chicago during the 1940s, fifties, and sixties, a Slavic neighborhood gradually being overtaken by Blacks and Spanish. It is also a harsh and repulsive section of the city, which the author's singular imagination nonetheless enchants, transforming it into a world of magical grotesques. With its antecedents in Russian, and, perhaps, in Yiddish literature (one is sometimes reminded of I. B. Singer's stories), as much as in Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell, his fiction treats Ragmen, who hold...