Long Made Short

by Stephen Dixon

Overview

"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 Book Review".

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801847394
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/01/1993
Series:	Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen Dixon is a two-time National Book Award finalist. Mr. Dixon has written over twenty short story collections and novels, including 14 Stories, Long Made Short, and All Gone, which are available from the Johns Hopkins University Press. He is a professor in The Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University.

Editorial Reviews

"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

The ever-prolific Dixon (whose novel Frog was a National Book Award finalist) once again brings his considerable stylistic skills to portraits of middle-class, college-educated men and women, many of whom work in academia. No other writer can capture characters so distinctly wholly by their thought patterns and speaking styles. Dixon plunges readers into the incessant bickering that infects marital relationships, often with a third person thrown in: a tour guide or a husband's ex-fiance. One story begins with a couple deciding to separate, then cuts to the man playing out various scenarios of a reasonably content marriage, some real, some imagined. Dixon's characters are united by their isolation in thoughts and fantasies, despite the presence of a loved one: a man sits in his chair recalling and reflecting on all the people he knew as a child while his wife bustles around the house. Macabre elements enter simplistic landscapes: a father and daughter fall from a plane and seem to float forever; a man cocks his finger toward a crow, says ``Bang-bang'' and watches it fall to the ground. Dixon's stories emerge out of everyday trivialities with a similar magic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The 12 short stories in this collection by novelist and storywriter Dixon, author of the acclaimed Frog ( LJ 1/92), concern loss and the oblique ways in which people--primarily men--cope with it. Long, somewhat cryptic sentences only slowly reveal: the reader stumbles into the middle of an exchange and must decipher the context, the relationships, even the subject. While some of the stories are fantastical, the most successful are painfully accurate depictions of the everyday routines that mark family relationships. In ``Man, Woman, and Boy,'' we eavesdrop on heartbreaking scenes, real or imagined, from a marriage that may or may not be on the brink of ruin. Dixon's male characters are self-absorbed and self-deceiving; they rationalize choices and obsessively probe their pains. His tolerant, caring, and straightforward women hold the moral high ground. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. --Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix

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