After “Hot Ice” was published in Antaeus in 1994, it was chosen for the prestigious O. Henry Award for short fiction. It is one of four Dybek stories given this award; this story and two of the other award winners are included in the 1990 collection The Coast of Chicago.

The 1990 Antioch Review refers to The Coast of Chicago, Dybek's second collection, as “paradoxically vivid and realistic,” calling his portrait of growing up in Chicago “richly remembered.” Don Lee, writing in Ploughshares, focuses on Dybek's propensity for shifting from what he calls “a gritty realism befitting Chicago's South Side to metafictional techniques which transform images into reverie, the tangible into the mythic.” He finds that, given the diversity of the subjects Dybek writes about, such shifts are entirely pertinent, noting, “Nothing could be more appropriate.”

In Michiko Kakutani's review of The Coast of Chicago for New York Times...