What Is All This?: Uncollected Stories - Softcover

Mr. Dixon wields a stubbornly plain-spoken style; he loves all sorts of tricky narrative effects. And he loves even more the tribulations of the fantasizing mind, ticklish in their comedy, alarming in their immediacy.

Some writers are able, in a mere 200 pages or so, to rewire your circuitry in a way that makes you unfit for your own life. Stephen Dixon is such a writer, and he can do it in a short story as well.

There is no better chronicler of our antic and anxious age than Stephen Dixon.--Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket)

Dixon's stories, strengthened by their unity, almost have a novel's ability to develop character, to suggest a life outside the confines of the plot.

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.

Stephen Dixon is one of the great secret masters -- too secret. I return again and again to his stories for writerly inspiration, moral support and comic relief at moments of personal misery, and, several times, in a spirit of outright plagiaristic necessity: borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon has been a real problem-solver in my own short fiction. Please read him, you.--Jonathan Lethem

For the last thirty years Stephen Dixon has written fiercely intellectual examinations of everyday life, challenging his readers with prose that rivals the complexities of William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. Fantagraphics Books is proud to re-present his 2010 hardcover collection of short stories, What Is All This?, in paperback form. 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.