Long Made Short (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Softcover

Dixon, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801847397 ISBN 13: 9780801847394

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993

Synopsis

"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".

About this title

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.

From Booklist:

You know all that babbling that goes on in your mind? All the static of random memories, bursts of old songs, goofy fantasies, and the mutter of self-consciousness, such as "I'm walking down the street; I hate these shoes; did I unplug the iron?" This constant chattering, called the monkey mind by teachers of meditation techniques, is Dixon's turf. Most of the dozen stories in this collection reflect a narrator's circuitous mental process. The scene might be a living room in which the wife is correcting papers, the only child is working on a jigsaw puzzle, and the husband is fuming. First he imagines a fight with his wife, already expecting to be rebuffed later in bed, then he feels a rush of love for his son, then a corresponding flood of feeling for his wife. Dixon is exposing the absurdity and confusion underlying the most ordinary of circumstances, but he also moves in the opposite direction, writing peculiar little tales, such as "Crows," in which a man suddenly finds that he actually can shoot with his finger, and "Flying," in which a sense of parental inadequacy causes a man to daydream about being sucked out of a plane with his daughter. A shrewd and humorous collection by an inventive and skillful writer. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0801847397
• ISBN 13: 9780801847394
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160