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Title: Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme ISBN: 0140153004 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58
Rating: 5
Summary: BETTER THAN A WET LUNCH
Comment: This book will change your approach to short fiction. It will also challenge your ideas about the limits of human creativity, eviscerating all of that ridiculous 10%-of-your-brain nonsense. You are powerless to these changes, fella - just try to relax. Donald Barthelme has been unfairly neglected by the publishing industry; fortunately, 60 Stories is a fantastic representation of his talents (which are just innumerable, dammit). D.B. is currently in holy respite on the Isle of Avalon; either that, or he's drinking at a bar in Newark, wearing a funny disguise. Regardless of the details, he's aloof. One day he'll return to save his country, and if you haven't read this book, he's going to give you the business.
Rating: 5
Summary: Barthelme is a Master
Comment: Barthelme's stories are short and spectacular. He is probably the postmodernist (Man, I hate that word, but what else can you call it?) writer with the most understanding of the language. Some passages are beautiful, some disturbing, some confusing. I don't think there's a story in this volume that doesn't deserve to be read twice, and some ("The Indian Uprising","The Emerald","Daumier") should be read far more frequently.
If you have any interest in absurd fiction, then Barthelme is the man for you, and ths volume gives a broad selection of his best work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Donald Barthelme - 60 Stories
Comment: In his review of "American Beauty," the New Yorker movie critic David Denby writes, "I can think of no other American movie that sets us tensions with smarty pants social satire and resolves them with a burst of metaphysics." The same can be said for many of the stories in this collection. The first three fourth's of "The School," for example, is narrated with the deadpan cool that predominated in popular eighties minimalism. It is textbook black humor. But "The School" ends with a poetic riff on cultural relativism, exposing everything that came before in the story, and giving us a glimpse of the narrator's frailties. And then with the final two lines, Barthelme throws in an oddball joke, making the story even more uncertain. It's like on The Simpsons, when you get their craziest, surreal joke right before a commercial break. A Barthelme story simultaneously invites interpretation and outguesses the reader.
Another great thing about both Barthelme's stories and "American Beauty" is that when a narrative stradles that border between reality and parody, the characters get away with making the most straightforward thematic statements. In "The Seargent," a story about a middle aged man who somehow finds himself stuck in the army again, the narrator keeps repeating, "This is all a mistake. I'm not supposed to be here," etc. "Of course I deserve this." If the protagonist of a realistic, mid-life crisis story made these statements it would be interpreted as too obvious. Suspension of disbelief might be violated. When the situation is absurd, however, the characters can be beautifully direct. Artificial people bemoaning the fact that they are bound within an artificial form can be very poignant to us real people bound by necessity. Our situations are curiously congruent.
This is my favorite book. It reminds me a lot of when I was a kid and I had a favorite toy. It is informed by the French noveau roman novel, though less dark, where the experience of reading is given primacy over the experience of the characters. If I had simply bought the book and read the stories in order then put it back on the shelf, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the enjoyment that I did out of it. This book is in my library and I go to the shelf and peruse through it whenever I need a break from studying. It has so much play and creativity. Barthelme has said that collage is the dominant twentieth century art form. Pieces of writing that resemble advertising copy or quips from a political documentary, are juxtaposed with philosophical discursiveness. And the humor, fortunately, keeps it from getting overly pretentious, though some might find it pretentious at first. I've talked to a number of readers who think Barthelme is just faddish, conceited and intentionally obscure. If you find that's the case, I encourage you to give it time. Especially if you're a fan of contemporary short stories. If not for any other reason, it'll give you a new perspective on Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver, among others. If I had to choose favorites, I'd say "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel" and "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," but all the stories in this book are worth it.
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Title: Forty Stories (Contemporary American Fiction) by Donald Barthelme ISBN: 0140112456 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: SNOW WHITE by Donald Barthelme ISBN: 0684824795 Publisher: Scribner Paperback Fiction Pub. Date: 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon ISBN: 0060931671 Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley ISBN: 0374524319 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (The Anchor Literary Library) by John Barth ISBN: 0385240872 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 1988 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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