Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

The Washington Post Magazine : “Córdoba”

Tin House : “The Start of Something,” “Arf,” “Fiction”

Transatlantic Review : “Ravenswood” (first published as “The Conductor, the Nun, the Streetcar”)

TriQuarterly : “I Never Told This to Anyone,” “Flu”

X, A Journal of the Arts : “Hometown”

Witness : “Drive”

Thanks also to the editors of the following magazines in which later versions of some of these stories were published: After Hours; Dimensional Lines; Flash; Jelly Bucket; Mirabella; Oak Bend Review; Skywriting; SmokeLong Quarterly; The MacGuffin; Memphis State Review; The Nervous Breakdown; Water~Stone Review.

And thank you to the editors of the following anthologies in which some of these pieces appeared: An Anthology of Very Short Fiction , Flatmancrooked Press; Bestial Noise , Tin House Books; Blue Cathedral , Red Hen Press; Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction , Rose Metal Press; Flash Fiction Funny , Blue Light Press; Flash Fiction International , Norton; Hint Fiction , Norton; Just Good Reading from the Pages of “The Critic,” Thomas More Press; Micro , White Pine Press; Micro Fiction , Norton; PP/FF , Starcherone Books; Shorts , Norton; Sudden Flash Youth , Persea Books; The Party Train , White Pine Press; The Southern California Anthology , the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program; The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road , Norton.

A special thanks to Motoyuki Shibata and to Philippe Biget for their translations of some of these pieces into Japanese and French; to Susan Stamberg and NPR’s Weekend Edition , who first commissioned and broadcast “I Never Told This to Anyone”; and to Judith Kitchen and Stan Rubin, founders of the State Street Press, Brockport, New York, which in 1993 published a twenty-eight-page chapbook titled The Story of Mist , in which several of these pieces, in earlier versions, appeared.

This book was finished and reworked during time afforded by a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.