What Is All This?: Uncollected Stories

By Stephen Dixon

Book Overview

For the last thirty years Stephen Dixon has writtenfiercely intellectual examinations of everyday life, challenging his readerswith prose that rivals the complexities of William Gaddis and David FosterWallace. Fantagraphics Books is proud to present his latest volume of shortstories, What Is All This? The tales in the collection are vintage Dixon,eschewing the modernism and quasi-autobiography of his I trilogy and insteadtreating us to a pared-down, crystalline style. Centrally concerning himselfwith the American condition, he explores obsessions of body image, theincreasingly polarized political landscape, sex in all its incarnations and thegloriously 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 aprofound humorist: the New York native captures the edgy madness that infectsthe city through the neuroses of his narrators with a style that owes as much toNeo-Realist cinema as it does to American literature. What Is All This? is an immense and vastly entertaining collection that will delight lovers ofcontemporary fiction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 160699350X
• ISBN13: 9781606993507
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Length: 566 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 2.1" x 6.2"