Barthelme, Donald

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A Collection of the Highest Order
Me and Mrs. Mandible
Brilliant but not for Everyone
Difficult but rewarding
The Balloon Man

Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Putnam Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0399126597

Amazon.com

This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.

Book Description

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

Customer Reviews:

A Collection of the Highest Order.......2007-04-25

I picked up 60 Stories after experiencing Barthelme's City Life. I don't have a lot to add to what the fine Amazon reviewers have already said.
Just that I found myself strangely moved and completely entertained by Barthelme's style and detached characters.
Towards the end of the collection, I started reading the stories out loud to my girlfriend and she was equally enthralled by the Barthleme's shorts. Both of us loved City of Churches. The dark, cryptic ending had me laughing out loud at the order of things (as a side note, I was reading this on the bus, listening to my Ipod on shuffle. as i came to the ending, Marilyn Manson's The Beautiful People came on ... great twist to the ending). Original, hilarious dialogue. Intelligent, creative tales. History, philosophy, commentary. Laughs, tears, and everything in between. An absurd, but touching presentation of human emotion and emotionlessness.
I don't know. I just felt better after reading 60 Stories. There are more possibilities now, less restrictions, more Leaps and fewer hurdles, more Kierkegaard and less Hegel.
My only question is this: Why did I have to wait 26 years to stumble across Senor Barthelme? Where was he in my Creative Writing courses or English courses in college? Outside of courses on absurdist lit, experimental lit, or short stories, I'm not sure where an institution would park Mr. Barthelme. Maybe I can make a suggestion: American Lit.

Jump on it!

Me and Mrs. Mandible.......2005-07-11

We recently read "Me and Mrs. Mandible" in our online reader's forum and the response was very favorable. Barthelme's metafiction can be interpreted so many ways it is great fiction for discussion groups. If you'd like to read the posts or join in the ongoing discussion visit [...].

Brilliant but not for Everyone.......2005-04-07

Judgments about Barthelme remind me of how subjective criticism of literature is. Is he a genius or a fraud? One thing is for certain: if you do not have a taste for the absurd you are probably not going to like Barthelme. His stories are filled with absurdist/surrealist elements. But for me, what separates him from other "experimental" writers is his ability to elicit emotion from the reader. For example, when I first read the ending of "The Balloon", I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. And I couldn't say exactly why. Same with "The School." But there is something about his writing that works on the precognitive level. Unlike some reviewers, I don't find anything chilly or removed about his writing. There seems to be a genuine sympathy for his characters, even when placed in the most ludicrous of circumstances. So I line up on the genius side. And by the way, he's flat out the funniest writer I know of. 60 Stories is a good place to start if you're interested but if you like it, also check out 40 Stories, which features simpler writing.

Difficult but rewarding.......2005-03-01

After I'd read about half of these stories, and in many cases, read them again, I suddenly realized what the trick was to enjoying them- losing my expectations. For Barthelme, the form is as important, if not more important, than the message, and each of these stories is an experiment in form and meaning (and not always both at the same time). Once I stopped looking for deeper meaning, and trying to figure out what he was trying to say, I realized that, often times, he's not saying anything, he's merely experimenting with language. "Aria", for example, or "Glass Mountain", are absurd for the sake of being absurd, while "A City of Churches" is more obviously social commentary. "The School" is darkly funny, and "Me And Miss Mandible" is a well-crafted, entertaining short story, full of absurdity and humanity, and one of the best in the book.

Also, you can't help but notice the huge influence that Barthelme's work has had on many writers living today, especially those who enjoy playing with language and stretching the bounds of fiction (read ANY of Steve Martin's short stories and you'll see what I mean).

The Balloon Man.......2004-02-28

In one of the most typical, poignant, funny, and resounding stories in this collection, Barthelme introduces us to the Balloon Man. For now, it doesn't matter who or what he is, but suffice it to say that he, the Balloon Man, reckons the Balloon of Perhaps is his best balloon. Reading this collection, it's hard not to be struck by the idea that Barthelme's gift lies in, amongst other things, being able to write stories at once featherlight, attractive, and capable of imagining and exploring "perhaps's" no other writer could.

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Playing the B-sides
Funny, sad, inoculating, irritating
Incredibly funny
Oh yes...
Reprinting Genius

The Teachings of Don B.
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679741194
Release Date: 1998-03-31

Book Description

A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. A game of baseball as played by T.S. Eliot and Wilem "Big Ball" de Kooning. A recipe suitable for feeding sixty park-enamored celebrants at one's daughter's wedding. An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who, until his death in 1989, more or less goosed American letters into taking a quantum leap. Now sixty-three of Barthelme's rare or previously uncollected shorter works--including satires and fables, plays for stage and radio, and collages--have been assembled in a single volume. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the power to blast any reader into an altered state of consciousness.

"Barthelme happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.'"--Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction

Customer Reviews:

Playing the B-sides.......2003-02-20

The critical consensus on Donald Barthelme is that he basically reinvented the short story during his lifetime (he died in 1989). While there is some exaggeration involved in this assessment -- at times, Barthelme seems to be doing nothing much more than channeling Kafka -- his work is unique, inventive, and experimental in the best sense of the word. The present collection contains many of his occasional and "lighter" works. A number of them, for example, originally appeared as unsigned pieces in "The New Yorker". If the collections "Sixty Stories" and "Forty Stories" can be seen as Barthelme's greatest hits, then "The Teachings of Don B." can be seen as the B-sides. The subtitle of the book calls this a collection of "satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, and plays," and the description fits. The title story is a send-up of Carlos Castenada's "Don Juan" books, and on the whole the volume is marked by a certain air of lightness and good humor. There is a stretch in the middle, consisting mainly of works that originally appeared between chapters in the book "Overnight to Many Distant Cities", that is somewhat slower and more ponderous than the surrounding text, but it doesn't last for long. Of particular interest are the illustrated stories, where the text is complimented by collages made from old photographs and illustrations, somewhat in the manner of the Surrealists. My only complaint about this book is the inclusion of three short plays at the end. While interesting, they don't quite mesh with the rest of the volume, and could easily have been published on their own. The collection also features an introduction by Thomas Pynchon, which in itself it worth the price of admission.

Funny, sad, inoculating, irritating.......2000-02-08

With the possible exception of Thomas Pynchon, there isn't a writer around, living or dead (that I know of--I haven't read them all), who gives us a funnier, more accurate understanding of the absurdity of late twentieth-century existence than Barthelme, and it's good to have these previously uncollected pieces in one volume. The quality of this book is, I believe, remarkably even, but some pieces hit me harder than others. No one could have written "Here's the Ed Sullivan Show" but DB; what an eye the guy had!

Read this book (or SIXTY STORIES or SNOW WHITE) and you will not be able to look at the world in the same way again. DB knew better than most what petty, unexamined, selfish lives we live (but this is not to say that DB was mean spirited). Does he give solutions? Sort of, but not solutions that I am capable of paraphrasing. There may be readers for whom DB's teachings will seem pointless and not worth the trouble. (To them I say, "Back to your Grisham and Steele!") But for most of the rest of us--as bombarded as we are with insulting campaign pitches, thisandthat.com (!) ads, news of how the market is making us all wealthy, endless blockbuster film versions of mediocre TV shows, more tripe about what a great president Reagan was and on and on--DB can function as a sort of philosophical ophtalmologist with a rare antidote that will both make us laugh at and feel a bit grim about our consumer society.

Incredibly funny.......1999-03-25

I have never read anything this hilarious. It's perfectly balanced, too: Barthelme never goes too far or too short. Also get the "40 Stories" which in my opinion are much better than the 60.

Oh yes..........1998-12-08

Just about perfect

Reprinting Genius.......1998-08-12

Anyone familiar with Barthelme's short stories knows what a joy they are. This recent reprint collects loads of Borges-sized nuggets not available in his other collections, and they will leave you in stitches. "When I didn't win the New York State lottery" seemed poignant to me after buying my first lotto ticket for the big prize, and planning out what to do with the hypothetical winnings. There are dozens of stories, two plays, and more here. A must have for Barthelme fans, and it has an introduction that is actually worth reading by Pynchon.

Forty Stories (Contemporary American Fiction)

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son of a son of a son........
The Perfect Motivation
Marvelous collection by one of America's most unique writers
A good, if a bit uneven, collection
defies imitation

Forty Stories (Contemporary American Fiction)
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140112456

Amazon.com

Like the title says, here are 40 short works culled from across Barthelme's career. Along with the similarly titled 60 Stories, this book provides one of the best samplings currently in print of Barthelme's unrivaled humor, his melancholy, the poetry of his line, and his considerable intellect. It includes pieces such as the famous "Sentence," (a single, several-page-long, unfinished sentence), "The Flight of Pigeons From the Palace," one of the writer's illustrated stories, and "Overnight To Many Distant Cities."

Book Description

William H. Gass has written of Donald Barthelme that “he has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction.” In Forty Stories, the companion volume to Sixty Stories, we encounter a dazzling array of subjects: Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage and divorce, armadillos, and other unique Barthelmean flights of fancy. These pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces tangle with the ludicrous, pose questions that remain unresolved, and challenge familiar bits of language heretofore unexamined. Forty Stories demonstrates Barthelme's unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore.

Customer Reviews:

son of a son of a son...............2005-08-30

The Marx brothers and origami have an affair. They name the bastard Donald barthelme.

The Perfect Motivation.......2005-08-23

As an aspiring writer, these stories by Barthelme give me hope that experimental literature still thrives in this sound byte-, laugh track-, talking head-prompted, fast-paced MTV culture of ours. For the most part, the stories take a level of patients foreign to the average reader, but are so creative, so clever, so breathtaking (to sound cliché)--and let's not forget: short (most average 6ish pages)--and so on that before you even have a chance to let one story sink in, you're already well into the next. Which, I might add, is a good thing. The stories challenge but, unlike contemporaries who mimic Barthelme's style, are not challenging in such a way as to detract or distract. They stick with you long after you've read them and, like Eggers says in his introduction, it's hard for someone who writes to make it through a page without being struck by an idea of their own. Inspiring stuff.

Marvelous collection by one of America's most unique writers.......2002-05-04

Donald Barthelme is one of the very few masters of the short short story. The only others that come to mind are Saki, Borges, and Franz Kakfa. Few of the stories in this collection extend past three pages. All are marked by the same virtues evident throughout the collection: surreality, inventiveness, enormous humor, a sensitivity to our collective culture. Some have commented on the collection being uneven. Perhaps. But the stories are quite diverse, and I suspect that what some find uneven is actually their diversity, some of them appealing more to one's particular bias more than others.

This is a great collection for shaking up your perception, for making you reconceptualize the short story form. Anyone liking these stories should go on to try some Saki (the author, not the beverage). Although not as surreal as Barthelme, his stories are just as short, just as funny, and just as delightful.

A good, if a bit uneven, collection.......2001-11-26

This collection has many great short stories within it. Often, within this book, Barthelme shows himself to be an extremely creative and insightful writer. "Jaws" is a good example of this. Basically, it's a story about how people deal with their dissatisfaction in relationship; how lovers cope with significant others' inevitable inability to meet all their (the lovers') expectations. It follows a workers at a local A & P while he mediates the relationship of two customers (who are married to each other). He acts as a sort of counciler in their marriage. The interaction between the couple is extremely humorous, and yet very sad (as, I suppose, dysfunction can often be). It's an excellent piece of work, and it deals with a common theme throughout this collection: The dissatisfaction of couples in long-lasting relationships. "Chablis," "The Genius," and "Paul Klee..." are also all excellent short stories. They exhibit Barthelme's ability to be humorous and yet still get at an interesting/serious point (that is, not lose himself in zaniness).

After such praise, however, I must admit that this collection isn't without flaw. Out of the forty stories that are included in this book, I felt that about ten of them could have been pruned away. These stories (for example, "On the Deck," and "Blue Beard") seemed unfulfilled, and worse, overwritten. These, perhaps could have used a little more focus on content rather than style. It's true with almost any collection of short stories that not all of them are good, enjoyable, or interesting (that is, not all of them will catch your imagination). However, with this book there seemed to be quite a few of those. So despite the fact that many of the stories in this collection are great, I'm only giving it three stars.

I would recomend this to anyone in search of a humorous, challenging read. I would also, recomend this to someone who is interested in cutting edge, stylized short stories (after all 25-30 of them in this collection are very good). Many of the short stories in this collection are written in an unusual manner. For instance, "The Bodygaurd" is compose almost entirely of questions. I'm also of the opinion that those of you who like both Kurt Vonnegut jr. and Thomas Pynchon would find this collection interesting.

defies imitation.......2000-06-29

During Barthelme's lifetime, I think many readers thought that his work would permanently alter the short story form. He achieved such powerful effects; his stories were so funny, so moving, so original and offbeat, and yet so deceptively simple and effortless-seeming. I certainly expected that other writers would come along and produce similar stories, since he had shown how it should be done, and we would be innundated with Barthelme-like fiction. But I don't think that's really happened. There have been imitators, of course, but they've been mostly embarrassingly flat, replacing the master's edgy brilliance with silly incoherence. Barthelme defies all imitators; his stories continue to stand as one-of-a-kind monuments, written in a truly singular voice by a truly singular talent, to urban life in the late 20th century. Read them. I particularly love "The Genius," with its poignant and yet absurd portrait of the world's most brilliant man, and "At the Tolstoy Museum," with its hilarious drawings of the great author's supposedly gargantuan coat, etc. It's funny because it's (somehow) true, like all of his work. "40 Stories" is the best introduction to Barthelme, so if you don't know him, this is the place to start.

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The Story Can't Unite the Hithering Thithering Graphics

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Overlook Juvenile
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Opposite

ASIN: 1585678287
Release Date: 2006-11-16

Book Description

From the brilliant mind of Donald Barthelme, the National Book Award-winning tale for children of all ages.

One morning in 1887, Mathilda went out into the back yard and discovered that a mysterious Chinese house had planted itself there overnight. She had wanted a fire engine, but the mysterious Chinese house was intriguing too. From inside came strange sounds: growls, howls, whispering, trumpeting.

Plucky Mathilda walks right in. She finds all sorts of peculiar things: a sulky captured pirate, a giant popcorn-popping machine, an elephant that falls downhill once a day—truly "every kind of flawless flourishy footlooseness." Mathilda gets to see everything in every room, guided by the hithering thithering djinn, who even arranges to leave her a souvenir that is just about exactly what she wanted.

Renowned author Donald Barthelme presents Mathilda's escapade in a witty and whacky text with collage illustrations made entirely from nineteenth-century engravings. It's a unique, fun, and ultimately wonderful book.

Customer Reviews:

The Story Can't Unite the Hithering Thithering Graphics.......2006-12-26

What Donald Barthelme has apparently done is take a collection of mildly amusing 19th-century engravings and, as an experimental attempt at a children's book, write a short story around them. The story is a wandering and observing of various silly characters and scenes, like Alice in Wonderland, without Carroll's creativity*, yet not without some fun and wit. The character who most comes to life is a knitting pirate who makes sardonic comments and tells the story of his capture by the Chinese. Like the rest of the text, the pirate's story is cobbled together to match the pictures. He goes abruptly from a storm at sea (a full-page illustration) to being under Chinese attack. Not that I don't appreciate the nice little conceit of telling a story within a story in a book where the text, if gathered together, would add up to six pages.

* Despite Barthelme's penchant for forcing words into new parts of speech. He turns hither into hithering, thither into thithering, flourish into flourishy, and footloose into footlooseness. But it's tinkery -- see, even I can do it -- and trivial compared to Carroll's Jabberwocky-quality word creations.

In an earlier version of this review, I complained that the heroine is stiff, wooden, and uninteresting. However, when I reread the text, I didn't see that problem, and I wondered what made me think that. It's the illustrations! Barthelme had only one engraving of his main character, but because she was the heroine, he had to show her more than once. So six times (counting the cover), here is the same fancily dressed girl, holding a hoop, calmly staring back at the reader. One exception is on page 12, where someone, possibly Barthelme himself (or possibly the daughter with whom he collaborated on this book), attempted a small, original drawing of Mathilda and the pirate, standing in profile next to each other. But it is obviously by a different artist. To a lesser extent, Barthelme also reuses engravings of the pirate, the djinn, and Mathilda's parents. He crops the repetitions, resizes them, or mirror-images them, to try to make them look different, but they are still repetitions and therefore give

the book a monotonous feel. And most pictures blend poorly with each other and with their monotone backgrounds and are obviously cut-and-pasted. So experienced readers, except a few literati who are in awe of Barthelme, will see a collage that is less than the sum of its parts. Children will be more forgiving. But even children need a smooth, professional flow of text and pictures to draw them into the fantasy.

On pages 60-61 of Talk, Talk: A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups, E.L. Konigsburg explains some of the politics behind this book's winning of the 1972 National Book Award for Children's Literature. I agree that the award was undeserved, but I disagree with the assertion that Barthelme did not even succeed in writing a children's book. While The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine is not a great children's book, children can find some enjoyment in it.

The story line is not a bad idea for a children's book: Mathilda enters a mysterious Chinese house on a quest for a red fire engine. Politely but persistently, she asks her "djinn" guide for a fire engine. By the end of the book, she has received ALMOST exactly what she wanted.

Here are the major reasons why I think this book earns three stars: The whimsical artwork (the originals on which the book is based, not the repetitions), the witty conversations, and the lesson for young readers: Specify the color. Minor reasons are the hard cover, the spacious layout on the large pages, and the implicit challenge to look up "djinn" in a large dictionary or a search engine.

I bought this 30-page book for my 11 year old granddaughter as a companion gift to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Signet Classics), with the wonderful illustrations by John Tenniel. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine amused her and whetted her appetite for Carroll's two masterpieces.

So much for my first book review. Reviewing books is harder than reviewing gadgets!

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Come Back, Dr. Caligari
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Little Brown & Co (P)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The King
Snow White
Paradise (American Literature Series)
The Dead Father
Sixty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

ASIN: 0316082546

Average customer rating:

Uh
PM Lit at it's best
i guess you love it or you hate it
grimm, this isn't!
Don't Waste Your Time

Snow White
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Touchstone
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Sixty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
The Dead Father
Lost in the Funhouse (The Anchor Literary Library)
Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions

ASIN: 0684824795

Customer Reviews:

Uh.......2007-02-07

Honestly, and I know many will have problems with this sort of thinking, most of the reviewers on this page are obviously just too stupid to understand this novel or enjoy it.

PM Lit at it's best.......2006-07-11

Never before have I seen an actual novel this grand!
It's as if, with the most vague thought of how this novel should be, Barthelme decided to not just write a novel, but more appropriately to PAINT a novel, using absurdity, social commentary, and political insight as his palette of choice. Given, I feel that there were many jabs that were directed at his "contemporaries" at the time that I did not understand, but overall, the disjointed narrative that is vaguely linear was a fantastic read!

If any are having difficulty "understanding" the book, perhaps if you just read it the whole way through, and don't worry about trying to "get" it, just read it and then the big picture will start to appear.

i guess you love it or you hate it.......2005-08-16

this is one of those books that you take it for what it is... stop trying to make it the snow white you remember... becuase it is not. Barthelme plays with questions about beauty, and strength using characters we have known our whole lives. love it!!

grimm, this isn't!.......2004-08-01

my introduction to donald barthelme was his short stories. i learned of this book and dove right in. this was quite a romp! i feel for the other reviewers that may have felt that this was a faithful rendition of grimm classic. it certainly is not!! it is twisted and thought provoking. my favorite passages are the quiz and the end of part one, and the letter that jane (the evil stepmother) writes to a stranger in the phone book, mr. quistgaard. that truly makes you stop and think about the way things are today and how we insulate ourselves in our own plenum. in a rather strange way, it made me want to do the same thing!

i know absolutely nothing about post-modernist literature. i don't even know what it means. what i do know is that barthelme creates and recreates his own personal universe with each story and book. each one unique and provocative. i have read that barthelme is the master. i can believe it.

Don't Waste Your Time.......2004-05-13

From the reviews I had read about this book, it was supposed to be an intellectual, highly appealing and enchanting updated version of a classic children's story in which the dwarves are not really dwarves but rather sexually charged men who each take their turns having sex with Snow White in the shower (and only the shower, never in a bed). Snow White is seeking her Prince Charming, whose name is Paul. The wicked stepmother, whose name is Jane, is out to get Snow White. And one of the "dwarves", Bill, doesn't like to be touched...by anyone. Other than that, there wasn't much else I understood about this book. It was a very disjointed book. The writing was stilted and had the feel of a foreigner speaking in a second language. The conversations were completely unrealistic and the voices in my head, while reading, kept on speaking in a mechanical drone; no expression or hint of emotions. Really, really, really, wasn't worth the three evenings I spent reading it. I would be interested in knowing if anyone else has read and understood this book, but I certainly would not recommend purchasing it!

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Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: B000EVHCM4

Product Description

One of the US's most sylish and original satirists - a collection of stories

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme

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In need of Barthelme

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Sixty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
The Dead Father
Snow White
Children of Men (Widescreen Edition)

ASIN: 0679741208
Release Date: 1999-01-26

Book Description

When Donald Barthelme died at the age of 54, he was perhaps the most imitated (if not emulated) practitioner of American literature. Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain unparalleled for the way they capture our national pastimes and obsessions, but most of all for the way they caputure the strangeness of life.
Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

Customer Reviews:

In need of Barthelme.......2000-04-23

The remaining chunks of the master's prose reconnoiterings are brought to light here. Essays, reviews, pieces written on assignment ... what amazes is how closely Barthelme's nonfiction resembles his classic short stories. If you already own "40 Stories" and "60 Stories" and still find yourself GASPING for more Barthelme air ... this is for you.

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My introduction to Barthelme

City Life
Donald Barthelme
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JUVN6G

Customer Reviews:

My introduction to Barthelme.......2007-03-06

I picked up a ragged pocket-sized copy of this at my local Half-Price Books for 63 cents. Might be the best 63 cents I've ever spent. I doubt I got the point, if there was one or many, to many of the stories in this collection, but it didn't even matter. Barthelme's humor and accessible language made each story a pleasure to read (except for Bone Bubbles, a stream-of-conscious, punctuationless, seemingly disconnected (what did I miss?!?!?!) ramble). I'm full of superlatives for Senor Barthelme. Creative fiction at its finest! Knows no bounds! The Donald has broken the plain of American fiction and on and on and on. It took me 26 years to find him, but it was well worth the wait. I'm looking forward to 60 Stories.

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The Dead Father
Barthelme Donald
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JPH21Q

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