The Play and Other Stories [Paperback]

Stephen Dixon (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dixon ( Garbage ) is preoccupied with deathby accident or suicide, old age or murderwhich may or may not have occurred. The title story depicts a writer suffering from a familiar maladywriter's block: "Maybe he has said it all." The writer dreams up plays: two actors digging themselves deeper into holes in the sand who are threatened by a rising tide; a rape in an abandoned shack. But technical problems such as the need for close-ups (which cannot be achieved in theater) and such questions as partial versus total nudity eat away at his resolve to begin. Dixon's people are intelligent, imaginative creations, humorous and long-suffering, somehow paralyzed or stagnating. The 45-year-old who quits his menial restaurant job analyzes it thusly in "The Clean-Up Man": "Maybe that's what was wrong with me all these twenty, twenty-five years. I never once lost control."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In earlier works like Garbage ( LJ 8/88), Dixon has chronicled the lives of besieged city dwellers. Many of these stories retain a gritty urban setting, but the emphasis is now on jagged interior landscapes. In "The Ringer" a lonely man rings the doorbells of total strangers chosen by means of a complex system that gives uniqueness to his self-appointed task. In "Change" a man resolves to be more sociable and discovers the complications that arise from merely saying good morning and insisting on a response. Filled with incoherent conversations, fractured relationships, and disjointed sequences of events, Dixon's world is ominously conspiratorial but sometimes outrageously funny. Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press (November 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0918273455
• ISBN-13: 978-0918273451
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,246,647 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.