FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS ANNOUNCES THE ACQUISITION OF STEPHEN DIXON'S WHAT IS ALL THIS?, A COLLECTION OF MODERN FICTION
SEATTLE, WA, NOV. 20, 2009 --- Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce the acquisition of
What Is All This?, a 900-page collection of previously uncollected short fiction by two-time National Book Award Nominee (1991, 1995)
Stephen Dixon.
The collection will be published in May, 2010 and mark the third entry
in Fantagraphics burgeoning line of literary fiction, following
Alexander Theroux's
Laura Warholic (2007) and Monte Schulz's
This Side of Jordan (2009). Along with Theroux, Dixon is the second
National Book Award nominated-author to publish new fiction through Fantagraphics.
"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
Dixon
is one of the most acclaimed authors of short stories in the history of
American letters. He has published previously through acclaimed
independent literary presses like McSweeney's and Melville House, as
well as corporate houses like Henry Holt. His work, characterized by
mordant humor and a frank attention to human sexuality, 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 present his latest volume of short
stories, a massive collection of vintage Dixon, eschewing the modernism
and quasi-autobiography of his I-trilogy and instead treating readers to a pared-down, crystalline style more reminiscent of Hemingway.
"Dixon
is one of the few writers whose new work I will put everything aside to
read, which is to say he is in the company of Alice Munro, Lorrie
Moore, and Lydia Davis.... Put aside whatever you're reading, and read
him." - J. Robert Lennon
"This is our third book of prose fiction -after Alex Theroux's Laura Warholic and Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan-
and readers may notice that the common denominator among these books is
that language itself serves as the animating literary force," says
acquiring editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth. "Dixon's
finely chiseled sentences cut to the quick of people's lives. None of
these stories have been collected in any book; 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 in
What Is All This?
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 (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-Reaist
cinema as it does to modern literature.
What Is All This? will be published in hardcover, designed by Fantagraphics award-winning Art Director
Jacob Covey.
"Stephen Dixon is one of the few writers who completely challenged,
then changed how I think about writing and reading," says Covey. "He
was the first writer I recognized as making Art that was as viscerally
relevant as painting or music. Designing a book for someone who was so
formative to me is one of the rarest and most intimidating
opportunities I can imagine."
"I have read a lot of Dixon's writing. If I didn't like his writing I would not have read so many things of his." - Tao Lin
Stephen
Dixon was born in 1936 in New York City. He graduated from the City
College of New York in 1958 and is a former faculty member of Johns
Hopkins University. In his early 20s, he worked as a journalist in
radio, interviewing such monumental figures as John F. Kennedy, Richard
Nixon, and Nikita Khrushchev. 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 Interstate. He still hammers out his fiction on a vintage typewriter.
Fantagraphics Books
has been the world's leading publisher of comics and graphic novels
since 1976, with titles by Robert Crumb, Charles M. Schulz, Joe Sacco,
Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and many others. In 2007, the company
launched its prose division, beginning with novels by Alexander Theroux
(
Laura Warholic) and Jules Feiffer (a reissue of the noted artist's 1963 novel,
Harry, the Rat with Women).
Stephen Dixon