Goodbye to Goodbye

At once deeply personal and comically exuberant, Goodbye to Goodbye is the first major collection of Stephen Dixon’s stories since 1994, spanning the author's remarkable career from his very first published story to never-before-published works. The stories reflect the development of a unique and ever-evolving style, from earlier, more traditional stories; to pioneering experiments with dialogue, point of view, and sentence structure; to what became his trademark: obsessively self-revising texts that reflect experience as if through a funhouse mirror, paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. As J. Robert Lennon writes in his introduction, this work “doesn’t efface its artificiality; it doesn’t want its reader, or its author, to disappear.” When Stephen Dixon passed away in 2019, American literature lost, in Jonathan Lethem’s words, “a great secret master.” In a career that spanned six decades, Dixon published over seven hundred short stories and nearly twenty novels, two of which were shortlisted for the National Book Award. Arguably, his innovative work represents the earliest appearance of what we now call autofiction, and many of this generation’s writers count him among their greatest influences.