End of I

In collaboration with the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation and the author’s family, McSweeney’s is thrilled to celebrate the life and career of Stephen Dixon. The sequel to I., End of I. revisits that novel’s intimate territory, tightening the author’s unflinching focus even as he widens the scope. With his characteristic exuberant prose, Dixon probes, almost to the edge of comfort, the minutiae of consciousness, as his aging subject reckons with his life, reflecting on illness, death, family, past friendships, and lost loves. With both narrative playfulness and earnestness, Dixon crafts a poignant meditation on memory and loss that is intensely human and imbued with urgency and warmth. 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.