A massive tome from one of America's greatest living writers. 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.
Draws a portrait of an American man through a collection of shorter stories documenting his romantic and sexual encounters over the course of forty years, showing the pain and wonder of love that are such a part of life in the modern world. 12,500 first printing.
In this fictional prose novel, reminiscent of Scorsese's After Hours, a New York man goes on a nightmare-logic adventure when he tries place a phone call. 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,” Letters to Kevin obeys a certain logic, but it’s a shifty, nighttime logic that’s full of surprises.Letters to Kevin is an absurdist, screwball farce, and certainly Stephen Dixon’s wildest and weirdest book ever. It’s also, sneakily, one of his most affecting.
Gould, the fictional narrator, shares his thoughts about his life, real and imagined, from his past, through the mundane world of the present, to his dreams for the future, recalling a full range of regrets, mishaps, bad decisions, obsessions, fears, and anxieties. 12,500 first printing. Tour.
A lost novel originally written at the end of the 1960's, and too free with its metafictional soul for the publishers of even that era. This is Stephen Dixon enmeshed in domestic concerns as always, but with a young, ferocious energy that will amaze even the readers of his great later work. Stephen Dixon: "SOASAOS: AN is a novel I wrote 40 years ago, tried to get it published for a couple of years, got some unflattering rejections for a change--before they were always gracious and 'not right for us' and 'wouldn't know how to market this' and 'hope you have better luck with it with another publisher...' If accepted, it would have been my first published book...
World War I (1), 1914-1918 - World War II (2), 1939-1945 - Vietnam War - Gulf War - Holocaust - Social change - Status of women - Cold War - John F. Kennedy - Conflict in Ireland - Problems in Yugoslavia - Arab-Israeli conflict - Apartheid - Civil rights in the United States - Martin Luther King Jr. ; John F. Kennedy (JFK) - John & Jacqueline Kennedy & the Camelot image - Kennedy assassination & the conspiracy theory - Origins & end of the Cold War - Australia life at the time of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II and the Fifties.
Australia in the Modern World has been written to meet the needs of Level 6 and Level 6 extension outcomes of CSFII. It provides a complete course for Year 10 history.
Through vignettes that zip forward and backward in time, Dixon weaves together a complex portrait of the man’s life, from the moments of his marriage to his later days where, struggling with his loss, he fumbles to find clarity and certainty in his writing. Through his characteristic restrained prose, Dixon explores what it means to be human, with themes of love, loss, and companionship.
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