I have to agree with what is printed on the back of this book, courtesy of the LA Times: "Dybek's gift - a considerable one - is a sorcerer's ability to comix the commonplace and the grotesque..." Dybek can very much do that. He takes a simple day, and mixes into it the mystical, imaginary, fantastical... the grotesque. Everything. And he still makes it tangible, real, accessible. Maybe even more so. His description is spot on, in the way that things so specific are.

My only trouble with the stories here (these stories being the only ones of Dybek's I've read) is that they tend to go on a little bit. The stories have multiple plot lines, which is appropriate for novels, but loses me a bit in stories. What is most important sometimes gets buried in tangets - albeit very well-written tangents, but tangents all the same. I think if these stories were half as long, they might be even more successful than they are now.