Stephen Dixon I Daniel Clowes Signed First Edition McSweeney’s 2002

Description

Stephen Dixon’s I. is a deeply personal, seemingly autobiographical novel built around a man raising two young daughters while caring for his increasingly disabled wife. Memory, marriage, fatherhood, illness, mortality, anger and remorse circle one another through Dixon’s obsessive, digressive prose. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Dixon developed an intensely individual style across a remarkably prolific career, and I. stands among his most intimate explorations of domestic life and mortality.

McSweeney’s turned the 2002 first edition into a terrific physical object. Daniel Clowes created the portrait of Dixon printed immediately inside the front board, while a giant die-cut “I” in the burgundy cloth allows part of the portrait to stare through the closed cover. This copy carries Clowes’s large red signature directly across his own portrait, making the artist’s contribution to the book especially tangible. An unusual intersection of contemporary American fiction, early McSweeney’s book design and the work of one of the defining figures in alternative comics.

A Daniel Clowes-signed first printing of one of McSweeney’s most distinctive early book designs.