The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek

This amazing collection of short stories manages to be both lyrically dreamlike and grittily realistic at the same time, which is a large part of the charm. They concern the growing up of a young man in a Polish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago which has been designated as an Official Blight Area. Mixing small sketches with fully developed short stories, Dybek expresses nostalgia for a lost time along with loneliness and longing for a brighter future. The writing is beautiful.

My favorite stories were the first and the last. In the first, "Chopin in Winter," a young boy and his elderly family-problem uncle listen to the upstairs neighbor as she plays through the works of Chopin on the piano. The music connects them as they long for the past while moving to a new future. The last, "Pet Milk," is haunting and pretty much the perfect short story. A young man recently graduated from college and on his way out of the world of his youth remembers his grandmother drinking Pet milk in her coffee and watching "the Pet milk whirl and cloud in the steaming coffee, and noticing, outside her window, the sky doing the same thing above the railroad yard across the street." This leads him to a remembrance of his after-college girlfriend, and a passion-invoked incident. Let me repeat--the story is perfect.

I know I would have liked this story collection even more if I had ever even been to Chicago. As it was, it made me remember incidents of magic in my own childhood in entirely different but almost equally bleak surroundings.

Recommended.