Nathan Dixon: Radical Red | BOA Editions; June 2025
Growing up in Cary during the nineties, Nathan Dixon often rode around in his grandfather’s Cadillac. The same radio show was usually switched on.
“I don’t think I even knew who Rush Limbaugh was until years down the road,” says Dixon. “He was just this voice, embodied.”
That type of voice—crude, angry, dogmatic—is likewise embodied in the short story “Consubstantial,” midway through Radical Red, Dixon’s debut collection and the winner of the 13th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize. In the story, a (fictional) popular conservative talk radioman pops pills, rails at young people, leers at young people, and gradually begins to lose his grip on both reality and his bodily autonomy. And while Limbaugh’s brain is not one I’ve ever particularly wanted to be inside, “Consubstantial” and its adjoining stories are smart, funny, and well-wrought.
So goes Radical Red, a collection of eight loosely interlinked stories that feature far-right figureheads—religious leaders, politicians, eager college Republicans—who find the inherent contradictions of their ideology collapsing in on them.
“I’m very interested in these things,” says Dixon, “because I think they’re bad.”
We’re having coffee at Redstart Takeaway in North Durham. Dixon, who has a thick mustache and equally thick drawl, received his MFA from North Carolina Central University and his PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia; these days, he’s back in Durham with family, teaching at NC Central.
In a publishing era where having Instagram is basically as important as being literate, he doesn’t have social media, preferring postcards to Twitter threads—which may contribute to why his book has received relatively little attention. It’s too bad, though, because Radical Red is a sharp and timely read. Magical realism meets social realism: Think Denis Johnson reporting from a pronatalism conference, or Samanta Schweblin tangling with Project 2025.
When I first took Radical Red out of its mail packaging, though, I didn’t think I’d like it. The title is heavy-handed, as are the bulky epigraphs that precede most stories, featuring quotes from the likes of Nixon, Trump, and Thomas Jefferson. Writing a book this thematically dense seemed risky, if not outright didactic.
The deeper I got into the book, though, the happier I felt to be away from the familiar landscape of most contemporary short stories—unhappy dinner parties; existential poolside conversations; people with expendable incomes having affairs.
Beyond that, the writing is also just very good: Whole worlds are conveyed in Dixon’s short, staccato sentences. Here’s the wistfully lecherous radioman in “Consubstantial” watching women in the park: “The jogging ladies moved to the slow vibrations of the world. Rebounding and rubbery. Something he might gobble up. He felt the heartbeat of America.”
In “Spring Belle,” the next story, things get equally singsongy, uncomfortable, and surreal. Past and present, daughters and dolls, violence and purity culture all smash together in one woman’s extremely disturbing day of running errands. “Blonde curls, pink blossoms,” the narrator intones, dressing her daughters. “Compliant now. Pliant. She lifted their arms and dressed them, talking to herself. A martyr like her mother.”
All of the stories in Radical Red were written before the 2016 election. “Consubstantial” is the first story Dixon wrote, in 2013, back when the rise of the Tea Party movement was still fresh; “Unnamed Black Male,” the first story featured in the collection, was written shortly thereafter. As Dixon revised and wrote more stories throughout President Obama’s second term, he wondered if the country was experiencing some kind of “hopeful curve”: maybe the reactionary elements of the stories would be outdated by the time they were published.
“The crazy thing is I was trying to get these out so fast because I thought they would become irrelevant,” says Dixon.
Of course, those themes didn’t become dated. And to the extent that anyone is angered by American injustices—corporate greed, racial injustice, mass incarceration, ICE, environmental degradation, the oligarchy—Dixon’s characters appear to be just as fired up about what they say is a less free America. They believe that the term “culture war” is literal and that they are soldiers on the front lines.
“It’s the 1770s all over again,” a young woman in the second story, “Tricky Dick,” fires off at her “liberal professor”—a refrain that comes up more than once. “We want revolution, not reform.”
This is one of the things Radical Red does quite well. Although there is absurd humor in the book—take the zealous protagonist in “Tricky Dick,” the president of her college’s Students for Life Coalition, whose inflamed pimple gradually metastasizes, taking over her life—by and large, it takes the right wing seriously.
That is wholly appropriate because, seven months into President Trump’s second term, we are living in a very serious moment. The images coming out of the administration—Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw on stage, Kristi Noem ghoulishly posing in front of a Venezuelan jail cell crammed with deported men—may be absurd, but they’re also our shared reality.
“The stories are surreal,” Dixon says, “but [they’re] no more cartoonish than the absurdity of what we hear on the news every day.”
To that end, the last story in the book, “Conquistador,” is about a white man who goes out drinking and wakes up in the body of a Mexican neighbor.
It’s a Freaky Friday premise that could easily be cheesy but in the upside-down world of Radical Red—a hair off from our own, no more—it makes perfect sense for things to end this way, as this story does, with a character facing down the barrel of his own gun, frantically reciting a monologue about American exceptionalism: “This was it. He had imagined it a thousand times. Home invasion. Bank robbery. Terrorists at the shopping mall,” the narrator tells himself. “It’s the 1770s all over again.”
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