Stephen Dixon is one of the most prolific and stylistically important authors of short fiction in modern American literature, with over four hundred stories published in magazines from the Atlantic Monthly and Playboy to small-press journals such as Fiction International and the North American Review. In terms of quality and impact his fiction resolves problems of representation and mimesis without turning back to the straightforward realism that postmodern theorists and practitioners have so effectively questioned. His ten collections are among the most intelligently and artistically organized short-story volumes since Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).

Born Stephen Ditchik in Brooklyn, New York, on 6 June 1936, Dixon is the son of Abraham (a dentist) and Florence Ditchik (an interior decorator). They moved with him to Manhattan when he was one year old. A dental practice was set up in part of a brownstone where the family lived; when Stephen...