I might take an incident and just run with it. That isn’t how I met my wife. ~46,000 WORDS ©2012 Fugue State Press Read reviews on Goodreads & Amazon A lost novel originally written at the begining of the 1970's, and too ferocious in its metafictional hilarity for the publishers of even that era. Readers of his previous work will find in 14 Stories that same wry, inventive, knife-edged humor that has come to characterize his distinctive style. I read the novel years ago, when moving into a more dense part of the city, going through it and taking my time. His books tend toward the big-boned and expansive, and his prose--with its steamroller pacing and superabundance of sensual detail--is maximal down to the last comma. Stephen Dixon's "Interstate" takes eight different passes at the same story, and each of them is remarkable in its own vision. This is just the first of several pregnancies for which Gould accepts no responsibility. There might be an incident from my own life and I’ll just turn it into fiction. Somewhere on a desolate stretch of Interstate, a car pulls alongside you, and the passenger and driver seem intent on scaring you. When we first meet him, he is an opportunistic college freshman in the process of seducing a girl whom he later impregnates. With 30, however, the author may have exceeded even his own record for literary megatonnage. Stephen Dixon's stories and novels have an original, immediately recognizable sound and feel --a weird blend of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra. Dixon: Well, somebody else has told me that, and every single story is a fabrication, starting with the last one. Over the course of a long career, Stephen Dixon has never been bitten by the minimalist bug, or even lightly grazed by it. Imagine you're a father, driving home with your two young daughters after a long weekend in New York City. Maybe the whole thing seems taken from life, because the character and I both have a wife and two daughters.
Depth, I think, is the key word for this book. Gould Bookbinder, the protagonist of Stephen Dixon's novel, Gould: A Novel in Two Novels is not a nice man. I had a lot to do during that move, but 'FROG,' deserved my time. Large, many pages, slim cover and stories within stories.
Dixon's 'FROG,' is the one he will be remembered for.