Love and Will: Twenty Stories

Innovative novelist and short story writer Dixon ( Fall & Rise ; Garbage ) displays a distinctive voice in these 20 well-crafted tales. Highly charged, insistent, often expressing themselves in gritty urban vernacular, his narrators emerge as ironic, sensitive, self-deprecating losers and loners. In the title story, Will thinks of his hopeless love for Dana, paces his apartment, tends his dying father. A composer in ``Buddy'' strolls through Manhattan meeting friends, but his sexual encounter with an opera singer is brief and alienating. Venturing on Broadway, Lewis in ``Dog Days'' is bitten by the possibly rabid pet of a transvestite. Incidents spill over into absurdist nightmares. The narrator of ``In Time'' rushes to aid a screaming woman, only to fall for eight years into the enslaving clutches of two weird sisters. ``Magna . . . Reading'' deals with the fatigue of a resisting reader who balks at the output of a prolix writer friend. Despite his experiments in style, Dixon remains rooted in daily reality, his narratives combining a dark humor with a surreal vision of the world. (Nov.)