Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories - Softcover

"[Dybek's] two new collections establish him as not only our most relevant writer, but maybe our best. . . . Each season, the Powers That Be take a book, any book, possibly at random and proclaim it the Biggie, The Obligatory Best Seller. Could it be Ecstatic Cahoots . . . Here's hoping." --Darin Strauss, New York Times Book Review

"The excellent Stuart Dybek continues to challenge and dazzle. These modern-day palm-of-the-hand stories will do much to keep this exciting form alive." --Amy Hempel, author of The Dog of the Marriage

"Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern confirm Dybek as a virtuoso of the short story--a nimble, compassionate writer who uses precise, lucid, original descriptions. He shows us all we need to know and nothing more." --Valerie Milner, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Masterful . . . Like Proust, Dybek has a deserved reputation as a superb cartographer of memory." --Trevor Quirk, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"A superlative collection . . . [Dybek's] stories are sharply self-aware, full of references, and yet they never feel contrived. Rather, they evoke a wistful yearning, in which the act of telling can do only so much." --David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Dream and memory, humor and pathos, song and silence: At his best Dybek combines these disparate elements in a shimmering web." --Philip Connors, Newsday

"[Stuart Dybek is] a magician comparable to Eudora Welty and Joy Williams." --Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune