In the ten stories that comprise Friends, Dixon writes with his unusual flair, wit, and gentle irony. Through Will and Magna, characters he first introduced in his first collection, Time to Go, Dixon offers many insights into the complexities and richness of human relationships.

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.

"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."—The New York TimesThe interlinked tales in this Late Stories detail the excursions of an aging narrator navigating the amorphous landscape of grief in a series of tender and often waggishly elliptical digressions.Described by Jonathan Lethem as "one of the great secret masters" of contemporary American literature, Stephen Dixon is at the height of his form in these uncanny and virtuoso fictions.With Late Stories, master stylist Dixon returns with a collection exploring the elision of memory and reality in the wake of loss.Stephen Dixon was born in 1936 in New York City. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Frog and Interstate, which were nominated for the National Book...

In 30 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 themillennium, a good man trying to live an honest life without compromise and without losing his mind.

This prose fiction novel, written by literary prizewinner Stephen Dixon, replicates the consciousness of a jilted man.Stephen Dixon, one of America's great literary treasures, has completed his first novel in five years — His Wife Leaves Him, a long, intimate exploration of the interior life of a husband who has lost his wife. His Wife Leaves Him 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...

Written before stalking became a social issue, Stephen Dixon novel about a young man's obsessive love for a beautiful woman takes place for 24 hours in NYC.

In the author's first novel since Frog, a nominee for the National Book Award, a father mentally replays, in eight variations, the shooting of his daughters on an interstate highway. 15,000 first printing.

An uncompromising collection of modern fiction.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 Harper's to Playboy and have earned him two National Book Award nominations—for his novels Frog and...

Stephen Dixon's stories and novels have an original, immediately recognizable sound and feel --a weird blend of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra. Readers of his previous work will find in 14 Stories that same wry, inventive, knife-edged humor that has come to characterize his distinctive style. With an adroit use of language and a keen eye for the quirky, offbeat side of human nature, Dixon creates a world as viewed through a fish-eye lens--slightly distorted and off-center, yet recognizable and often familiar.14 Stories is part comedy, part tragedy, part social comment and part spoof. But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.Review"These stories make a highly satisfying collection, not only for their evident craftsmanship but also because of the discriminating intelligence which underpins them." -- Times Literary Supplement"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." -- New York Times"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." -- Boston GlobeAbout the AuthorStephen Dixon has published more than 125 short stories and is the award-winning author of over a dozen books, including the collections Long Made Short and All Gone, available from Johns Hopkins.

Shaney Fleet is the owner of a working-class bar, and his problem is garbage. When a private hauler tries to coerce Shaney into purchasing collection services, he resists. Soon no hauler will remove his black-listed trash, and garbage that is not even his own begins to appear at his front door. Ultimately, his apartment is torched, his head bashed in, and his bar closed by the health department. In this well-wrought parable of modern urban life, literal garbage becomes a metaphor for the petty encumbrances, bureaucratic entanglements, and apparently insoluble problems that surround Shaney. As in the works of Kafka and Beckett, the mood is at once ominously threatening and irrepressibly comic.

A collection of 18 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

In "Time to Go," the author of the highly acclaimed "14 Stories," "Long Made Short," and "All Gone" has written a dazzling book of eighteen interlocking pieces. Part short story collection, part novel, "Time to Go" moves from despair to hope, from the passing of things--time, relationships, businesses, chances--to the coming of marriage, stability, family, a new life. It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough--and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.

20 well-crafted tales. Highly charged, insistent, often expressing themselves in gritty urban vernacular, his narrators emerge as ironic, sensitive, self-deprecating losers and loners.