“Whenever I feel that I've lost sight of a story I’m working on, I return to one book in particular: Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago. I can open this book to almost any page, read a few paragraphs, and be reminded of why I wanted to start writing short stories in the first place. There’s such simple elegance in the storytelling, such honesty and clarity on every page. I’m sure that all writers have a book like this, a book they return to with such frequency that half the pages have fallen out. The Coast of Chicago is mine.”
—Andrew Porter, author of Theory of Light and Matter (University of Georgia Press, 2008)
Photo credit: Chris Krajcer