You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Stephen Dixon.

He's the author most recently of a novel, Interstate.

His publisher, Holt, has also published his collected stories,

the stories of Stephen Dixon,

and his previous novel, Frog, was a nominee for the National Book Award.

He's written, I think, around 17 books, and these are, this is an American trajectory.

Almost every small press and every literary magazine that I've ever looked at has published stories by Stephen Dixon.

And, you know, it's a very interesting thing to watch because often you suspect that America doesn't provide the springboard

that will bring a writer to wider notice after a certain number of books.

You certainly assume that a writer may be just condemned to the world of the small press and the

literary magazine. I wondered, has your life, your writing life, altered by this new circumstance?

No.

Other than that I'm on a book tour for a book

which no other publisher was able to give to me,

I'm still writing the same way whenever I find a time to.

I sense that the technique of your writing, long paragraphs, long lines, have always been there from the beginning.

No?

...