Goodbye to Goodbye: Selected Stories

by Stephen Dixon

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 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.

Genres: Short Stories

436 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2026

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

[JPD · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the end, what’s the difference? And I don’t say that to you that way to make a joke. Let’s face it, dead is dead, and I know that whatever you say and read and however you say it, even if it comes out fumblingly, is meant well” (110).

I never read or picked up a book on release date, but I suppose my story with Dixon does not start there. I read Frog and fell in love with the way he portrays life and muddled comedy and tragedy in miraculously fresh ways. While I have been unemployed for almost a year now, I have received gift cards from the holidays and my birthday, which ultimately were to accumulate more from this gentleman. I read his first collection this summer, which I didn't like as much, but I understand his style from Frog hadn't fully developed yet.

Learning about a new Dixon collection coming out excited me, so I contacted McSweeny immediately, but I didn't hear back about getting an early copy to read. I kept checking for any information on what stories would be included, as I did not want to purchase it if I owned them already; it was not until going to the bookstore and picking it up that there was no section displaying where the stories originally came from, so I bit the bullet and picked it up at lightning speed, as if anyone else were picking this book up in their hands. A person looked for the Moresco translation without looking first, as if every bookstore wasn't laid out in separate departments in ABC order.

“His in-laws flew in from their city and were flying back soon after the funeral. Nice people. He said goodbye to them at the gravesite and while he was kissing their cheeks he thought, ‘I’ll never see them again’ ”(145).

Upon research, the people behind this collection did a wonderful job curating many stories from his apparent 500+ stories written; most stories can be found in previous works such as his last major collection in 1994, segments in his novels such as Frog, I.-rereleased along with this particular collection, and 30: Pieces of a Novel; I was happy to find stories previously only published in magazines such as Frederica- about a woman with a terrible memory interviewing the narrator for his biographer, creating not only a story for the woman, but the reader as well, or Three Novels- involving two letters: one is a bad, but not at all incorrect review of his works, the other even more angry confronting the narrator by putting his sister in one of his novels that killed herself, not withholding facts from fiction and the snowball affect that can happen when there is a lack of concealing facts from others for others sake; Even happier to find two stories only in this collection which are Photos- finally taking down all of his dead wife’s photos as it hurts him to see her, admitting his own storytelling pitfalls, which everyone likes to touch on when reading him, ultimately bringing the trash bag filled with her photos back inside by the end, not letting go, and Finding An Ending- a concession that not all stories are worth finishing and that he has written the same story hundreds of times.

“Goddamnit, goddamnit. For what the hell stopped you from giving me the prize this year? Because who’d you give it to? And who’d you give it to last year and the years before that? Do you remember? Does anyone remember?” (204).

I understand that this collection, like most of these stories, as I see with many of the Dalkey reissues, can be purchased, at worst, at market price on eBay, Thriftbooks, etc., but it's more for bystanders, if any, who come across Dixon on a bookshelf. Does this work, or is this a way to keep the rights? I clearly don't know, but I'm happy to say this will not disappoint if you give it to a man who essentially wrote his life into endearing vignettes that are more honest and uncomfortable than most are willing to go. Stephen Dixon’s prose can appear plain or even dull. Still, once you see that he is trying to stop writing in third person, move to first person, and ultimately write in second person without telling the reader, it's a delight to see what he does from story to story. He writes about having to tell the women in the women’s restroom that he is wheeling his wife in to go to the bathroom and that he is sorry he has to. He writes about apologizing to his children for yelling at them in different ways, ultimately diluting their empathy toward him. He writes a story at the end of this collection in which he is already dead and narrates what happens to his belongings and who to contact first. It is as if we are reading his will already, until we actually do, kind of near the end, as he goes over everything in sad, mundane detail.

“But what’s the purpose of this thing you’re writing and hurrying to finish? No other purpose but to get it out and down on paper and to think about what you’re writing and to read it after it’s written and in future days for it to remind you of what you did yesterday and how you felt about it today and also for you to perhaps get something from what you did last night that might end up being more than just a reminder of how you acted and felt, even if right now you don’t think it’s much, if anything at all” (292).

There is a foreword by Matthew Petti, who interviewed Dixon every week during the final 14 months before his death, which led me to send him a thank-you email; no response yet, and an introduction by J. Robert Lennon, whom I can only thank Jeff Bursey for his latest nonfiction for putting me onto his debut novel, which alone is worth purchasing. I have since pulled out and will inevitably read The Light of Falling Stars soon, along with Kristin Lavransdatter, as he read one of his stories to his child.

“Sometimes, it seems, I’m always doing, or doing a lot. I suppose I think I have a lot in my life to apologize for. Sometimes I feel one hasn’t grown up entirely until he’s corrected or apologized for all his mistakes in the past. And look at me. I’m almost seventy” (327).

I suppose I will be waiting for other collected unpublished works to be released in early October by McSweeny’s over the next two years, but I have plenty of his work to tide me over. I urge you to give Dixon a try, like when you turn around to look for a spider’s web that isn't there, only to feel a strand stick to your hair. If I call William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central what literature is all about, I would call Dixon's stories what life is all about.

I normally am outwardly distrustful of an endorsement or blurb. Still, I believe Tao Lin, if you have read him or seen him in interviews, is incapable of being dishonest and will show one of the best blurbs I have ever read: “When I finish [Dixon’s] books, I feel very aware that life will end, that the process of it ending is currently happening, even while I brush my teeth or stare at a computer screen[...] and that the process includes bodies and brains getting less effective[...] Knowing all that at a heightened level makes me feel calmer, more emotional, less despairing.”

Maybe it's my current stage in life that makes me feel enriched or even validated, but I think I would feel this way with his words no matter what stage of life I am in. Perhaps you'll feel the same.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book from McSweeney's. Katie from McSweeney's reached out if I had read and finished it and if so, would I be publishing a review somewhere. At the time I half-lied in my email back to her. I said I hadn't started it (but I had) due to the craziness of the semester (this part, the craziness of the semester, was true), and that I would reply when I had, and I apologized (although I'm unsure why I was apologizing). In any case, I did read through the book, many of the stories I had read before in other volumes, but when it came to figuring out a review or a venue to place the review, I felt overwhelmed. The semester was still crazy. Is, in fact, still crazy. So I decided to write my review here instead, on Goodreads, but also because I made a new years resolution to write a review of every book I read in 2026, I was kind of bound by own arbitrary rule to write it (but Katie from McSweeney's doesn't need to know this). Anway! What can one say about Stephen Dixon that hasn't already been said? When you read him, you invariably feel like you want to write. It is with a yeoman's quality and a carpenteresque ability with prose that Dixon writes about life. But he writes about it as if he is working in half a dozen genres at once. I sometimes wonder, when reading him, if I'm reading a story that's a romance or a noir or a horror story or a postmodern puzzle or just an old plain story of minimalist realism...all within the span of a few paragraphs sometimes. I don't know if they make them like him anymore. He's like Donald Barthelme, a great, dark humanist with peripatetic aesthetics. Nobody seems to be truly working in their lineage, and yet their fingerprints can be seen everywhere in good literary fiction these days. More people should read Stephen Dixon. Hail Stephen Dixon! Hail!