Radical Red

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Thiswinner of the 15^th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize features linkedstories that indict the ultraconservative movement that emerged at the end ofthe Cold War and extends into present day.

One strand of narratives follows a cohort of tea partyconservatives-a politician, a radioman, and atelevangelist-as their hyperbolic languageshapes the world around them and leads to episodes of time travel and bodyhorror. The second strand follows individuals victimized by conservativepolicy: their voices, their futures, their very bodies stripped from theirpossession. The final strand investigates the ways in which young conservativeshave adapted the nostalgic rhetoric of their forebears to carry on the twinprojects of minority oppression and environmental degradation-both of which they couch in the language of "freedom."

The book is set in the South and parodies the stereotypesthat are still so prevalent here. Although the characters are more than mereciphers, they move through their semi-speculative world to illustrate ideas inthe same way as Richard Wright and Ursala Le Guin's characters.

As income inequality soars, as industries become further mechanized, asthe populace cries out for some semblance of a social safety net andcorporations complain of too much regulation, we are long overdue for a strongdose of protest literature.

Reviews

Nate Dixons masterfully crafted stories back readers into a corner and make them squirm. Challenging and subversive,Radical Redpicks at the absurd contradictions and injustices that are woven into the fabric of American democracy. Maggie Su, author ofBlob: A Love Story

Radical Red is a corrective to a most peculiar trend in American letters. For close to four decades, writers have incrementally squeezed themselves into tighter perceptual and experiential corners. We call it, staying in one's lane. While it's true you can't tell another's story, it's all in vain if our stories don't move others, spark the imagination, move the heart, and keep the American conversation alive. Nathan Dixon's galvanic, strange, and beautifully written collection says, I hear you, cousins. Let's keep this thing going." Reginald McKnight, Author ofHe Sleeps

Philip Roth famously said of American Reality that it instills in the American Fiction writer a kind of professional envy. Nathan Dixon, in the extra extreme fictions found in Radical Red, creates a Reality American Reality must envy for real. These fictions are squared dances of Sydenhams chorea, crowd sourced unbroken fevered dreams on steroids. All the circuit breakers breaking, all the clocks persistently melting. Dixon is a demented Donald Barthelme dispensing meter-read disgraces, a media influencer Vonnegut doing unstuck loose-limbed tap dances on Bizarro TikTok. Michael Martone Author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne

Author Bio

NathanDixon,Quarterly West. His primary areas of academic interestlie in the 19th & 20th centuries, specifically in emerging and regionalmodernism(s), multi-ethnic literature, and discourses between the American andthe Global South. He currently teaches at North Carolina Central University andlives with his family in Durham, NC.