Phone Rings

A shocking phone call in the first sentence sparks a soaring tour-de-force saga by the writer Publishers Weekly deemed “a hip Saul Bellow.” It is the tale of two brothers, years apart in age, who have become close late in life. But the freakish death of one at the book’s outset sends the other reeling into a shattered yet strangely exhilarating revisitation of their lives together. Phone Rings is the work of a master at the peak of his a beautiful overlapping of scenes both remembered and ongoing, told with tenderness and an antic, laugh-out-loud sense of humor. In Dixon’s inimitable mix of absorbing narrative, deceptively simple prose, and waggishly innovative style, it becomes the sprawling chronicle of a large Jewish family in midcentury New York City, surviving three wars, the 1960s cultural revolution, marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. . . . Is it all lost with the piercing sound of a ringing phone? Or is that the chance to realize the possibility of transcendence? Stephen Dixon has long been considered the “secret master” of American fiction by great writers such as Jonathan Lethem. In this book, he may well have written his masterpiece. Stephen Dixon is the author of 24 books of fiction, including, most recently, the acclaimed Old Friends and the National Book Award nominees Frog and Interstate . His work has won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University.