Radical Red

As income inequality soars, as industries become further mechanized, as the populace cries out for some semblance of a social safety net and corporations complain of too much regulation, we are long overdue for a strong dose of protest literature. This winner of the 15th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize, features linked stories that indict the ultraconservative movement that emerged at the end of the Cold War and extends into present day.

One strand of narratives follows a cohort of tea party conservatives—a politician, a radioman, and a televangelist—as their hyperbolic language shapes the world around them and leads to episodes of time travel and body horror. The second strand follows individuals victimized by conservative policy: their voices, their futures, their very bodies stripped from their possession. The final strand investigates the ways in which young conservatives have adapted the nostalgic rhetoric of their forebears to carry on the twin projects of minority oppression and environmental degradation—both of which they couch in the language of “freedom.”

Radical Red is set in the South and parodies the stereotypes that are still so prevalent here. Although the characters are more than mere ciphers, they move through their semi-speculative world to illustrate ideas in the same way Richard Wright and Ursala Le Guin’s characters do.

Praise For Radical Red

“Nathan Dixon’s masterfully crafted stories back readers into a corner and make them squirm. Challenging and subversive, Radical Red picks at the absurd contradictions and injustices that are woven into the fabric of American democracy.” —Maggie Su, author of Blob: 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 of He 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 Sydenham’s 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