Though his most recent novel, Frog (1991), was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PENF/Faulkner Award, Stephen Dixon is even better known as one of our very finest modern American short-story writers. In books like 14 Stories, Movies, No Relief and Long Made Short, to name only a few, he has mapped out a literary landscape that portrays with great humor and insight the peculiar anxieties of contemporary urban life as well as the precarious conduct of our modern relationships.

His stories are at once fabulous and rooted in the concrete detail of ordinary existence, examples of an "experimental realism" that has won him comparisons to masters such as Kafka, Beckett and even Lewis Carroll. As John Hollander has written, "Stephen Dixon is a remarkable writer of originality and power, who has shaped through his often chilling, often funny tales a world of particular dissonances, disconnections and modes of anomie that is completely and recognizably his own.

1. In the Stories of Stephen Dixon, the author has gathered in one volume what he considers to be the very best of his short fiction, written over thirty years, from 1963 to 1993. The result is a tour de force, an enduring work that showcases the depth and range of Dixon's creative gift - for dialogue and narrative technique, for humor and surreal implausibility - even as it captures with pitch-perfect accuracy the absurdity and sadness of our urban scene. This is a publishing event.