Long Made Short (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) [Hardcover]

Professor Stephen Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1993 | Series: Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

This collection, a non-baker's dozen of what the author calls post-Frog fictions, work written since his novel "Frog" - a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize was completed in 1991, is about loss, mainly: culture ("The Rare Muscovite"), allurement ("The Caller"), reliability ("Flying"), continuity ("Man, Woman, and Boy"), potency ("Crows"), companions ("Voices, Thoughts"), skull ("Battered Head"), child ("Lost"), parent ("Turning the Corner"), footing ("The Fall"), prize ("The Victor"), collection ("Moon"), as well as the flip side of loss. This is not necessarily gain, triumph, or resurrection but imaginative recreation, creative refutation and self-destructive creation: what-could-have-been, what-I-should-have-done, what-never-took-place, which give the stories' stalkers a brief respite and interim release of unagitated loss, remorse, and compatibility. The range in emotion, situation, and technique is extreme: humorous-tragic, raw-lyrical, implausible-believable, bedlam-calm. "Long Made Short" is storytelling and story writing and also a story deleted from this collection to shorten it and make it an even dozen.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (November 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801847389
• ISBN-13: 978-0801847387
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,185,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen Dixon is the author of twenty-seven works of fiction including, most recently, Phone Rings and Old Friends (both published by Melville House). His novels Interstate and Frog were both finalists for the National Book Award. Frog was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has received the O. Henry Award, the Best American Short Stories award, the Pushcart Prize, The American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, and he has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.