Contemporary short stories about edgy, urban, obsessive characters by one of America's best writers of experimental fiction. What more is there to say about Gould Bookbinder, the sex-obsessed antihero of Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (LJ 1/97)? Dixon has come up with 30 more chapters of Gouldiana, recounting the hopes, regrets, and anxieties of his later years. In this new installment, Gould is an aging academic who lives in New York City with his wheelchair-bound wife, who suffers from MS. All of his mental energy goes into elaborate sexual fantasies involving much younger women. A waitress at a vacation resort in Maine, the daughter of a faculty colleague, a young woman playing frisbee in the parkAin Gould's mind they all want to have sex with him. Dixon presents Gould's obsessions in extravagant run-on sentences that build into page-long paragraphs. Each chapter is essentially a self-contained short story. The overall effect is engaging and somewhat addictive. Gould is a self-centered boor, but he is also a very recognizable Everyman. Recommended for larger fiction collections. [Dixon fans should also consider Sleep, a story collection he has published this spring with Coffee House Press, ISBN 1-56689-081-0, pap. $15.95.AEd.]AEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angele. -AEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. A gathering of 22 stories representing more than two decades of the career of National Book Award finalist Dixon (Gould, 1997, etc.), whose distinctively flat style (Anyway, theres my most vivid memory. Big deal, right?) carries traces of both Hemingway and Mametwith a bit of Woody Allens attitude mixed in. An incredibly prolific author who has published more than a dozen titles since the late 1970s, Dixon has established a cult following with work that straddles the border separating the experimental from the comic. Unreliable narrators predominate throughout, turning accounts of straightforward events (A man stands at a street corner) into idiosyncratic interior monologues (Did it last sumer so again itll be tuf the1st few days but then ill be all rt). This is clearly a collection aimed at fans, and Dixon is bound to have a limited audience at best. Nevertheless, newcomers to his work will find it a good introduction to one of the more original voices on the contemporary scene. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "Dixon's quirky style almost renders ordinary exposition unnecessary. Instead, Dixon careens back and forth between machine-gun dialogue and description, merging thoughts, conversation, and other absurd narrative into a single mind-blurring entity." -- Boston Globe many janes Give me a line. One night when I was sleeping a dream ap-peared to me. Wrong. A line. I woke up, got my socks on, shorts, put on my watch, strode down the hall, went to the toilet, had breakfast, dressed, or dressed and had breakfast, read a book First, made love to my wife, it's night, before I woke, I'm in bed, wife comes to bed, wife's about to come to bed, "Come to bed, wife," she does, love, sleep, wake up, toilet, dressed, breakfast, work. Forgot my watch. I call home and she says "It's right here where you left it," and I say "Where?" and she says "On the night table by your side of the bed where you always leave it when you go to sleep," and I say, I say what? I don't say "Ship it," since I'm only ten minutes away by car, I say "Please, I have tremendous difficulty without my watch, so imagine it on my wrist and I bet it'll be there," and she says "That's ridiculous," and I say "Hold it in your palm, close your eyes and imagine it on my left wrist, please," and she says "All right, little to lose," and next thing I know, thirty seconds at least, it's not on my wrist. I jump out of bed, toilet, dress, don't forget to shave, shave, downstairs, wake the kids, wake them, prepare their breakfast, no wife, just me and the kids, no woman, from downstairs "Kids, come on, I don't hear any rustling, get up, school, breakfast, I mean breakfast and then school, don't forget to wash your face and brush your teeth and hair, in whatever order you wish but the brushing with the two different kinds of brushes," still don't hear anything, "Kids, please, I don't want you to be late again, it's embarrassing to me and also makes me late for work," no reply or movement, I call their names, listen, go upstairs, door's open because I opened it when I woke them before, they're sleeping or pretending to or one's doing one and other the other, I let up the shade, should have done that when I First woke them, kiss their foreheads which I did before, muss their hair, rub their shoulders, except for the kissing I can do each of these at the same time since there's little space between their beds, room's very small and really only for one person but since their mother died two years ago they want to sleep in the same room, they stir, I say "School