Garbage

by Stephen Dixon

165pages. in8. broché.

Genres: Fiction

165 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1988

About the author

Stephen Dixon was a novelist and short story author who published hundreds of stories in an incredible list of literary journals. Dixon was nominated for the National Book Award twice--in 1991 for Frog and in 1995 for Interstate--and his writing also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beleaguered bar owner refuses to capitulate to a racket threatening him to change his garbage provider. Less stylistically relentless than Dixon’s other works, Garbage is a pulsating and satisfying tale of a man not cowering to a violent and corrupt system.

[Demis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfectly frustrating.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you ever feel like you are trying to live your own meagre life, but the forces of capital are acting against you, and any way you try to struggle against it results in suffocation by a world of garbage?

This is an underread masterpiece. Throw Kafka, George V Higgins, A Serious Man, Good Time and After Hours into a copper pot and distill it and shoot it back and feel like hammered shit - it's perfect. Dixon, using primarily excellent dialogue, conjures this despairing feeling of walls closing in on you, of snuffed out hope, but it's also studded with moments of humor, connection, and the genuine delight of being alive in the world.

It's the kind of thing where if it were a page longer it would be excruciating - just too much! - but as is its perfect novel. On the off chance that someone with money to burn and excellent taste sees this, buy the rights somehow and reissue this book.

[Douglas Beagley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used Reddit to find this book, on "whatsthatbook": I read this sitting on the floor between the shelves of a college library in 1996. It might have been entitled "Garbage" but I can't find that by googling. The main character owns a bar. Some people come and tell him that he needs to switch garbage collectors--it's a kind of a shakedown, or protection money, or something? He fights it, in various ways, because he doesn't want to be pushed around. This goes to the point of his total ruin, I think.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

the 11th dixon book i’ve read

[Gigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

So great and well executed. Never goes too big, let's the very real absurdities speak for themselves and just cranks the strangeness up a little bit more so it's just right. Devoured this and want to read it again, in part just to see how much money Shaney gives people, including in free drinks, versus how much he takes in. The back of the book cites Chandler, Kafka, and Joyce as influences (I got Joyce in the ear for dialogue/dialect), and I think that's true, though in a more grounded American blue collar way, and I also really thought of Dostoevsky-- with so many characters on the fringes, Shaney Fleet walking among them, a working class Myshkin showing the absurdity if not impossibility of living "fairly" or "upright" or "honestly" in America, where the moral high ground is built on sinking foundations of trash and garage, the deeper you sink, the more it will cost you for the privilege. I think Dzanc has a ebook of this but let's get this back into print! It's too good not to be better known.

[Dogra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Petit chef d'oeuvre d'humour noir qui sur un rythme quasi infernal nous tourmente entre l'amusement et l'effroi...Un style unique, sans pause ni respiration. A lire d'une traite tant il est prenant!