Fantagraphics has officially announced the new Stephen Dixon story collection, What Is All This?, due out in May 2010.

Click through for a shot of the (previously mentioned) cover (which I really like). Here's a quote for you:

Fantagraphics Books is proud to present his latest volume of short stories, a massive collection of vintage Dixon, eschewing the modernism and quasi-autobiography of his I-trilogy and instead treating readers to a pared-down, crystalline style more reminiscent of Hemingway....

"This is our third book of prose fiction -after Alex Theroux's Laura Warholic and Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan- and readers may notice that the common denominator among these books is that language itself serves as the animating literary force," says acquiring editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth. "Dixon's finely chiseled sentences cut to the quick of people's lives. None of these stories have been collected in any book; they have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals over almost 40 years and Dixon has entirely rewritten all of them. Dixon admirers will be cheered to learn that these stories comprise a wholly original work."

Oh, yeah, and it's about 900 pages long. Nice.