SOURCE: Caesar, Terry. “Glimpses, Surfaces, Ecstasies: Three Books of Short Fiction.” Michigan Quarterly Review 30, no. 3 (summer 1991): 506-18.

In the following review, Caesar lauds Dybek's style, noting examples of taut narrative impressively infused with lyricism and music.

The title story in Charles Baxter's new volume of stories is about a man who is telephoned one day by another man. He claims to be his brother. They meet at a bar. They are indeed brothers. “Isn't this great?” exclaims one. Well, no, thinks the other. “It was horrifyingly strange without being eventful.”

It is a line which can stand for some of the deepest impulses of contemporary short fiction. The strangeness is the important thing, whether or not it is horrible, and it is the more strange because the less eventful. Baxter's stories may be richer in event than those in the new volumes of Richard Burgin and Stuart Dybek...