David Dunwoody

Empire

Empire

The year i s 2112.

The crippled U.S. government and its military forces are giving up the century-long fight against an undead plague. Born of an otherworldly energy fused with a deadly virus, the ravaging hordes of zombified humans and animals have no natural enemies. But they do have one supernatural enemy: Death himself.

Descending upon the ghost town of Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, the Grim Reaper embarks on a bloody campaign to put down the legions that have defied his touch for so long. He will find allies in the city’s last survivors, and a nemesis in a man who wants to harness the force driving the zombies — a man who seeks to rebuild America into an empire of the dead.

Hailed as “A MACABRE MASTERPIECE OF POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE GOODNESS” on the Library of the Living Dead podcast, Empire brings stunning new twists to a shattering and unforgettable scenario of the not-too-distant future.

Stephen Dixon

14 Stories

14 Stories is part comedy, part tragedy, part social comment and part spoof. But most of all it is a series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

Stephen Dixon

Frog

A multi-layered and frequently hilarious family epic — Dixon combines interrelated novels, stories, and novellas to tell the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, children, and the generations that follow.

Stephen Dixon

30 Pieces of a Novel

Known to many as one of America’s most talented and original writers, Dixon has delivered a novel that is full of charm, wit, and humanity. In Dixon presents us with life according to Gould, his brilliant fictional narrator who shares with us his thoroughly examined life from start to several finishes, encompassing his real past, imagined future, mundane present, and a full range of regrets, lapses, misjudgments, feelings, and the whole set of human emotions. All of Gould’s foibles — his lusts and obsessions, fears, and anxieties — are conveyed with such candor and lack of pretension that we can’t help but be seduced into recognizing a little bit of Gould in us or perhaps a lot of us in Gould. For Gould is indeed an Everyman for the end of the millennium, a good man trying to live an honest life without compromise and without losing his mind.

Stephen Dixon

Interstate

What would you do if you were driving on the highway with your two daughters, and those in the vehicle next to you started shooting at your car? And you noticed one of your daughters had been hit? is a multifaceted vision of American violence, and an ode to the truth that the greatest love one has is for his or her child.

Stephen Dixon

Time to Go

Stephen Dixon is a very skillful storyteller. His grasp of the life of ordinary American citydwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination, without for a moment sacrificing its essential authenticity.

Stephen Dixon

What Is All This?: Uncollected Stories

Stephen Dixon is one of the literary world’s best-kept secrets. For the last thirty years he has been quietly producing work for both independent literary publishers (McSweeney’s and Melville House Press) and corporate houses (Henry Holt), amassing 14 novels and well over 500 short stories. Dixon has shunned the pyrotechnics of mass market pop fiction, writing fiercely intellectual examinations of everyday life, challenging his readers with prose that rivals the complexities of William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. Gradually building a loyal following, he stands now as a cult icon and a true iconoclast.

Stephen Dixon is also the literary world’s worst-kept secret. His witty, keenly observed narratives and sharply hewn prose have appeared in every major market magazine from to and have earned him two National Book Award nominations — for his novels and —a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. He has also garnered the praise of critics and colleagues alike; Jonathan Lethem () even admits to “borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon” in his own work. In all likelihood, many of the students who have passed through his creative writing classes at Johns Hopkins University have done the same.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to present his latest volume of short stories, The tales in the collection are vintage Dixon, eschewing the modernism and quasi-autobiography of his trilogy and instead treating us to a pared- down, crystalline style reminiscent of Hemingway at the height of his powers. Centrally concerning himself with the American condition, he explores obsessions of body image, the increasingly polarized political landscape, sex — in all its incarnations — and the gloriously pointless minutiae of modern life, from bus rides to tying shoelaces.

Dixon’s stories are crafted with the eye of a great observer and the tongue of a profound humorist, finding a voice for the modern age in the same way that Kafka and Sartre captured the spirit of their respective epochs. using the canvas of his native New York (with one significant exception that affords Dixon the opportunity to create a furiously political fable) he astutely captures the edgy madness that infects the city through the neuroses of his narrators with a style that owes as much to Neo-Realist cinema as it does to modern literature. is an immense, vastly entertaining, and stunningly designed collection, that will delight lovers of modern fiction and serve as both an ideal introduction to this unique voice and a tribute to a great American writer.

What Is All This?

Lydia Davis

The Cows

Quarternote Chapbook Series

"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says . Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few with such charged intelligence.

She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.

Gyorgy Dragoman

The White King

An international sensation, this startling and heartbreaking debut introduces us to precocious eleven-year-old Djata, whose life in the totalitarian state he calls home is about to change forever.

Djata doesn’t know what to make of the two men who lead his father away one day, nor does he understand why his mother bursts into tears when he brings her tulips on her wedding anniversary. He does know that he must learn to fill his father’s shoes, even though among his friends he is still a boy: fighting with neighborhood bullies, playing soccer on radioactive grass, having inappropriate crushes, sneaking into secret screening rooms, and shooting at stray cats with his gun-happy grandfather. But the random brutality of Djata’s world is tempered by the hilarious absurdity of the situations he finds himself in, by his enduring faith in his father’s return, and by moments of unexpected beauty, hope, and kindness.

Structured as a series of interconnected stories propelled by the energy of Dragomán’s riveting prose, the chapters of The White King collectively illuminate the joys and humiliations of growing up, while painting a multifaceted and unforgettable portrait of life in an oppressive state and its human cost. And as in the works of Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, and Marjane Satrapi, Djata’s child’s-eye view lends power and immediacy to his story, making us laugh and ache in recognition and reminding us all of our shared humanity.

Charles Dambrosio

The Dead Fish Museum

So Charles D’Ambrosio recounted his life in Philipsburg, Montana, the genesis of the brilliant stories collected here, six of which originally appeared in . Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. A son confronts his father’s madness and his own hunger for connection on a misguided hike in the Pacific Northwest. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in the bleak corridors of a Manhattan psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. A Thanksgiving hunting trip in Northern Michigan becomes the scene of a haunting reckoning with marital infidelity and desperation. And in the magnificent title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift dreamily beneath a surface of sexual tension toward a racial violence they will never fully comprehend. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, the backloads of Iowa and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love. D’Ambrosio conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by glory; here are characters, tested by every kind of failure, who struggle to remain human, whose lives have been sharpened rather than numbed by adversity, whose apprehension of truth and beauty has been deepened rather than defeated by their troubles. Many writers speak of the abyss. Charles D’Ambrosio writes as if he is inside of it, gazing upward, and the gaze itself is redemptive, a great yearning ache, poignant and wondrous, equal parts grit and grace.

A must read for everyone who cares about literary writing, belongs on the same shelf with the best American short fiction.

Charles Dambrosio

Loitering: New and Collected Essays

Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection spawned something of a cult following. In the decade since the tiny limited-edition volume sold out its print run, its devotees have pressed it upon their friends, students, and colleagues, only to find themselves begging for their copy’s safe return. For anyone familiar with D’Ambrosio’s writing, this enthusiasm should come as no surprise. His work is exacting and emotionally generous, often as funny as it is devastating. gathers those eleven original essays with new and previously uncollected work so that a broader audience might discover one of our great living essayists. No matter his subject — Native American whaling, a Pentecostal “hell house,” Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J. D. Salinger, or, most often, his own family — D’Ambrosio approaches each piece with a singular voice and point of view; each essay, while unique and surprising, is unmistakably his own.

Julia Deck

Viviane

Les Éditions de Minuit, publisher of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, rarely publishes a debut novel. Jean Echenoz, current star of the revered French literary house and enthusiastic fan of Julia Deck, confesses that he didn’t send his first novel to Minuit because they are "too demanding…the essence of literary quality, too good a publisher for me." This is why, thirty years later, a first novel published by Minuit has gripped French readers and taken the literary world by storm.

Sonali Deraniyagala

Wave

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.

Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

E L Doctorow

The Book of Daniel

As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents knock on the Bronx apartment door of a Communist man and his wife. After a highly controversial trial, the couple go to the electric chair for treason despite worldwide protests. Decades later their son, Daniel, grown to young manhood, tries to make sense of their lives and deaths — and their legacy to him. Like millions of other Americans, he is attempting to reconcile an America based on the highest human ideals with the tragedy of his parents. This is the framework for E.L. Doctorow's dazzling masterpiece, as he fictionalizes an actual social and political drama to create an intensely moving, searching, and illuminating tale of two decades, two generations, and a troubled legacy of passion and purpose, martyrdom and meaning.

E L Doctorow

Sweet Land Stories

In these magnificent portraits of people living life in America today, the bestselling author brilliantly ranges over the American continent, from Alaska to Washington D.C., in fiction that illuminates the heart of modern life.

E L Doctorow

Loon Lake

The hero of this dazzling novel by American master E. L. Doctorow is Joe, a young man on the run in the depths of the Great Depression. A late-summer night finds him alone and shivering beside a railroad track in the Adirondack mountains when a private railcar passes. Brightly lit windows reveal well-dressed men at a table and, in another compartment, a beautiful girl holding up a white dress before her naked form. Joe will follow the track to the mysterious estate at Loon Lake, where he finds the girl along with a tycoon, an aviatrix, a drunken poet, and a covey of gangsters. Here Joe’s fate will play out in this powerful story of ambition, aggression, and identity. Loon Lake is another stunning achievement of this acclaimed author.

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