Goodbye to Goodbye: Selected Stories [9781963270822]

Overview

When Stephen Dixon passed away in 2019, American literature lost, in Jonathan Lethem’s words, “a great secret master.” In a career that spanned six decades, Dixon published over seven hundred short stories and had two novels shortlisted for the National Book Award. Arguably, his innovative work represents the earliest appearance of what we now call autofiction, and many of this generation’s writers count him among their greatest influences.

Goodbye to Goodbye is the first major collection of Dixon’s stories since 1994. The current anthology includes work that spans Dixon’s remarkable career, from his very first published story to previously unpublished works written at the end of his life. The stories have been chosen to reflect the development of Dixon’s ever-evolving style, from earlier, more traditional stories; to pioneering experiments with dialogue, point of view, and sentence structure; to what became his trademark: obsessively self-revising texts that reflect experience as if through a funhouse mirror, paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. As J. Robert Lennon writes in his introduction, Dixon’s work “doesn’t efface its artificiality; it doesn’t want its reader, or its author, to disappear.”

At once deeply personal and comically exuberant, Goodbye to Goodbye showcases both Dixon’s unique perspective on life and his innovative approach to writing.