The Prolific Stephen Dixon

From a review of Dixon’s new, 500-page collection of stories, What Is All This?, which is all new material:

Five hundred and some short stories later, Dixon is among the most prolific writers of fiction still living. Though the author’s first book wasn’t published until he was forty, Dixon now has more than thirty novels and story collections to his credit. In just this past decade, Dixon has published—among other things—Phone Rings (2005), a novel that consists almost entirely of two men talking to each other over the telephone; I (2002) and The End of I (2006), a claustrophobic diptych chronicling the creative frustrations of an author who often seems suspiciously similar to his progenitor; and Meyer (2007), a book about writer’s block, something we can be entirely sure Dixon doesn’t have. His productivity is such that when he and Fantagraphics began to discuss doing yet another book of stories, What Is All This?, he was able to spare more than five hundred pages’ worth of previously uncollected material. Much of it is very, very good.

The rest at Bookforum.com.

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