Late Stories

Written before stalking became a social issue, Stephen Dixon’s novel about a young man’s obsessive love for a beautiful woman takes place over twenty-four hours in New York City.

A fast-paced novel told heavily through dialogue, examines just how far one is willing to go to live under his own terms.

Stephen Dixon is a very skillful storyteller. His grasp of the life of ordinary American citydwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination, without for a moment sacrificing its essential authenticity.

A collection of eighteen short stories by a “very skillful storyteller (whose) grasp of the life of ordinary American city dwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination.”

Stephen Dixon, one of America’s great literary treasures, has completed his first novel in five years — , a long, intimate exploration of the interior life of a husband who has lost his wife. is as achingly simple as its title: A man, Martin, thinks about the loss of his wife, Gwen. In Dixon’s hands, however, this straightforward premise becomes a work of such complexity that it no longer appears to be words on pages so much as life itself. Dixon, like all great writers, captures consciousness. Stories matter here, and the writer understands how people tell them and why they go on retelling them, for stories, finally, may be all that Martin has of Gwen. Reminders of their shared past, some painful, some hilarious, others blissful and sensual, appear and reappear in the present. Stories made from memories merge with dreams of an impossible future they’ll never get to share. Memories and details grow fuzzy, get corrected, and then wriggle away, out of reach again. Martin holds all these stories dear. They leaven grief so that he may again experience some joy. Story by story then, he accounts for himself, good and bad, moments of grace, occasions for disappointment, promises and arguments. From these things are their lives made. In , Stephen Dixon has achieved nothing short of the resurrection of a life through words. When asked to describe his latest work, the author said that “it’s about a bunch of nouns: love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving.” is Dixon’s most important and ambitious novel, his tenderest and funniest writing to date, and the stylistic and thematic summation of his writing life.

Rudy, a goodhearted fellow in New York, has been trying to phone Kevin Wafer, a kid he knows in Palo Alto, California. Only trouble is, one thing or another keeps getting in the way. For starters, Rudy doesn’t have a phone in his apartment, and he can’t manage to get a dial tone on his pillow or his alarm clock. When he tries to use a pay phone, the phone booth gets carried off by a crane, deposited in a warehouse, and left with Rudy trapped inside. What’s worse, the only repairman who shows up can’t help because he’s due to leave on his vacation and won’t be back for a month. Rudy tries to call for help, but all he can get on the line are other people locked inside other phone booths located other in warehouses all over the world. The only sensible thing for Rudy to do is to sit down with his trusty portable typewriter and write Kevin a letter, telling him what’s happened. Like Bob Dylan’s “115th Dream,” obeys a certain logic, but it’s a shifty, nighttime logic that’s full of surprises. is an absurdist, screwball farce, and certainly Stephen Dixon’s wildest and weirdest book ever. It’s also, sneakily, one of his most affecting.

14 Stories is part comedy, part tragedy, part social comment and part spoof. But most of all it is a series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

The two-time National Book Award finalist delivers his most engaging and poignant book yet.

Known to many as one of America’s most talented and original writers, Dixon has delivered a novel that is full of charm, wit, and humanity. In Dixon presents us with life according to Gould, his brilliant fictional narrator who shares with us his thoroughly examined life from start to several finishes, encompassing his real past, imagined future, mundane present, and a full range of regrets, lapses, misjudgments, feelings, and the whole set of human emotions. All of Gould’s foibles — his lusts and obsessions, fears, and anxieties — are conveyed with such candor and lack of pretension that we can’t help but be seduced into recognizing a little bit of Gould in us or perhaps a lot of us in Gould. For Gould is indeed an Everyman for the end of the millennium, a good man trying to live an honest life without compromise and without losing his mind.

A multi-layered and frequently hilarious family epic — Dixon combines interrelated novels, stories, and novellas to tell the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, children, and the generations that follow.

What would you do if you were driving on the highway with your two daughters, and those in the vehicle next to you started shooting at your car? And you noticed one of your daughters had been hit? is a multifaceted vision of American violence, and an ode to the truth that the greatest love one has is for his or her child.

Stephen Dixon is a very skillful storyteller. His grasp of the life of ordinary American citydwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination, without for a moment sacrificing its essential authenticity.

Stephen Dixon is one of the literary world’s best-kept secrets. For the last thirty years he has been quietly producing work for both independent literary publishers (McSweeney’s and Melville House Press) and corporate houses (Henry Holt), amassing 14 novels and well over 500 short stories. Dixon has shunned the pyrotechnics of mass market pop fiction, writing fiercely intellectual examinations of everyday life, challenging his readers with prose that rivals the complexities of William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. Gradually building a loyal following, he stands now as a cult icon and a true iconoclast.

Stephen Dixon is also the literary world’s worst-kept secret. His witty, keenly observed narratives and sharply hewn prose have appeared in every major market magazine from to and have earned him two National Book Award nominations — for his novels and —a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. He has also garnered the praise of critics and colleagues alike; Jonathan Lethem () even admits to “borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon” in his own work. In all likelihood, many of the students who have passed through his creative writing classes at Johns Hopkins University have done the same.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to present his latest volume of short stories, The tales in the collection are vintage Dixon, eschewing the modernism and quasi-autobiography of his trilogy and instead treating us to a pared- down, crystalline style reminiscent of Hemingway at the height of his powers. Centrally concerning himself with the American condition, he 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.

Dixon’s stories are crafted with the eye of a great observer and the tongue of a profound humorist, finding a voice for the modern age in the same way that Kafka and Sartre captured the spirit of their respective epochs. using the canvas of his native New York (with one significant exception that affords Dixon the opportunity to create a furiously political fable) 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. is an immense, vastly entertaining, and stunningly designed collection, that will delight lovers of modern fiction and serve as both an ideal introduction to this unique voice and a tribute to a great American writer.

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