Overview

Stephen Dixon's work has earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Fantagraphics Books is proud to re-present his 2010 hardcover collection of short stories, What Is All This?, in paperback form. Dixon's finely chiseled sentences cut to the quick of people's lives. None of these stories have been collected in any book before; they have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals over almost 40 years and Dixon has entirely rewritten all of them. Dixon admirers will be cheered to learn that these stories comprise a wholly original work. Centrally concerning himself with the American condition, Dixon explores obsessions of body image, the increasingly polarized political landscape, sex - in all its incarnations - and the gloriously pointless minutiae of modern life, from bus rides to tying shoelaces. Using the canvas of his native New York he astutely captures the edgy madness that infects the city through the neuroses of his narrators with a style that owes as much to Neo-Realist cinema as it does to modern literature. The softcover edition of What Is All This? will again be designed by award-winning Art Director Jacob Covey, whose hardcover design was honored as one the industry's 50 best books/covers of the year by AIGA.

Full Product Details

9781606995273

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Reviews

This mammoth collection presents five decades of Dixon: sex, frustration, and attempts at deeper communication, mostly missed. There are echoes of Ernest Hemingway and prefigurings of Raymond Carver 's lower-middle class minimalism infusing tales of scrappers and scrapers... these stories are a testament to an impressive career spent too much under the radar.

Starred Review: This mammoth collection presents five decades of Dixon: sex, frustration, and attempts at deeper communication, mostly missed. The 62 stories evoke neuroses, delusion, banality, and everyday absurdities in deceptively simple sentences Usually sublime, sometimes sloppy, and occasionally bewildering, these stories are a testament to an impressive career spent too much under the radar.

Author Information

Stephen Dixon was born in 1936 in New York City. He is a former professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and still hammers out his fiction on a vintage typewriter. He is also a two time National Book Award nominee -- for his novels Frog and Interstate.

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