- Farrar Straus and Giroux
I don’t know how to begin to describe Paper Lantern, Stuart Dybek‘s new collection of stories. The subtitle describes the collection as “love stories,” which I guess is as good a description as any. But a “love story,” as opposed to a “romance,” cannot be easily summed up, or broken down into neat elements like epiphany or foreshadowing or the three forms of irony like the tidy stories you had to read in ninth-grade English.
It seems it’s impossible for Dybek to write a bad sentence—until you remember that it’s been ten years since his last collection, I Sailed With Magellan (though it’s true he’s probably been distracted by teaching at Northwestern, and his publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, is simultaneously releasing the wonderfully titled Ecstatic Cahoots, a book of 50 much shorter stories). Paper Lantern is the product of hard work and care that reads as if it came into the world perfectly and completely formed.
