Dixon Interview

There’s a great interview with Stephen Dixon on Failbetter. Here’s an excerpt, in which Dixon discusses genre boundaries:

Both I. and End of I. read like collections of interrelated stories, but McSweeney’s released them as novels. Was this a marketing decision? How do you view them? Does the genre distinction matter to you?

The genre distinction doesn’t matter to me much. To me, an interrelated collection of stories about the same character or characters can also be called a novel. You get a full life in these collections, which you also do in a novel, and other similarities. In 1979, Harper & Row published my work Quite Contrary. I insisted it was an interrelated collection of stories; they, maybe for marketing reasons, said it was a novel. God knows why I was so insistent on calling it an interrelated etc. etc… They added the subtitle The Mary and Newt Story as a compromise. I wish I’d gone along with their suggestion about calling it a novel, because I now see that’s what it is.

The interview is freely available online.