Radical Red (American Reader, 43) - Softcover

Dixon, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1960145495 ISBN 13: 9781960145499

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 2025

Synopsis

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 15^th 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.

About this title

About the Author

Nathan Dixon received his PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia. His first book, Radical Red, won the BOA Editions short fiction prize. His creative work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Fence, Tin House, Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Redivider, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at North Carolina Central University and lives with his family in Durham, NC.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The police officer—a white man—walked over the crumbling asphalt that led to the sprawling brick tenements. Past liquor stores and payday loan lenders, past pawnshops and bodegas, neon words burning in barred windows. He was very pale in the sunlight and wore a dark blue uniform with a shining silver star on his chest. He whistled as he walked, a song he couldn’t place. Something old and reminiscent of war. He had parked his car on the other side of the old railroad tracks where the grass was gray and grew waist high between the rusty steel bars that ran in both directions forever.

People cursed him under their breath as he passed. Old men in suits, tapping along with canes, old women in bright monochrome with feathers in their hats, young women with children flocked about their waists, young women pushing strollers along the cracked sidewalks, younger women, still, with books beneath their arms, their hair in tight braids, glasses perched upon their noses. They shook their heads, whispered to one another, clutched at their children as the police officer passed.

Moving deeper into the complex of tenements, young men scattered before him as he whistled along his way. As he sucked at his pointed teeth and spat blood on the asphalt. Young men zipped up alleyways in pitter-patter shoes, their voices echoing down the shallow canyons. Five-O, Five-O, they called. Some ducked behind the plywood sheets nailed over the tenement doorways, others into corner stores that had trap doors in the back. Heads peeked from second and third story windows, cars pulled away from corners. Away. The black and brown friends of the black boy took off in different directions. Like cockroaches when someone flips the overhead switch. That’s what the police officer thought. Cockroaches in different directions so that you can never stomp them all out.

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1960145495
• ISBN 13: 9781960145499
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206