(A collection of eleven astonishing short stories focus on...)
A collection of eleven astonishing short stories focus on a group of people facing unusual situations or turning-points in their lives and the diverse consequences and alternatives of their futures
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140075801/?tag=2022091-20
( With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Don...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142437395/?tag=2022091-20
( Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and in...)
Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the 20th century. In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd and strange into the real in his usual epiphanic, engaging, and richly textured style. The stories delve further into themes that often interested Barthelme: the perils of the unfulfilled existence; the relationships between politics, art, sex, and life; and the importance of continuing to ask questions even though we are unable to learn the answers. This collection will delight both old fans and new readers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D0V038U/?tag=2022091-20
( The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, ...)
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374529256/?tag=2022091-20
(Donald Barthelme's premature death at the age of fifty-ei...)
Donald Barthelme's premature death at the age of fifty-eight brought to an end one of the most provocative careers in the history of American literature. Groundbreaking works such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari; The Dead Father; Snow White; Great Days; Overnight to Many Distant Cities; Guilty Pleasures; and his two short-fiction collections, Forty Stories and Sixty Stories, have earned him a place among the most influential and imitated authors of the last half-century. With his marvelously strange and darkly ironic vision of the world, his wizard satire and deadpan humor, Barthelme spoke of and for our time like no one else. He spoke of our national obsessions and weirdnesses, our unspeakable practices and unnatural acts, in what is for many the distinctive voice of postmodern America. Not-Knowing is the second posthumous collection of Donald Barthelme's work. Like The Teachings of Don B. (1992), it brings together shorter works now almost impossible to come by. While the first volume featured the author's tantalizing experiments in satire, parable, fable, and playwriting, this new volume focuses on his diverse nonfiction pieces, collectively referred to here as essays, although, as always with Barthelme's work, they are feistily resistant to any label. Categorizable or not, Not-Knowing contains Barthelme's pungent comments on writing, art, literature, film, and city life, which are, as John Barth says in his Introduction, among the permanent literary treasures of American postmodernist writing. Also here are several interviews with the author--invaluable for understanding this very private man--including two never before available. The interviews range over the last eighteen years of Barthelme's life, and they give readers the opportunity to watch his ideas as they expand, change, and settle. Kim Herzinger has gathered here an eclectic selection of pieces for Barthelme's many admirers, creating a work that will confirm his rightful standing as, in the words of Robert Coover, "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679409831/?tag=2022091-20
("No other word for it: a charming book." Peter S. Prescot...)
"No other word for it: a charming book." Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1564784037/?tag=2022091-20
(168 pages. Hardcover, first printing, bound in red cloth ...)
168 pages. Hardcover, first printing, bound in red cloth covered boards and wrapped in an illustrated paper dustjacket. A collection of short stories. The author's fourth published book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374124086/?tag=2022091-20
(When Mathilda discovers a mysterious Chinese house in her...)
When Mathilda discovers a mysterious Chinese house in her backyard, she enters a new world of imagination and adventure.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585678287/?tag=2022091-20
(An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fai...)
An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684824795/?tag=2022091-20
Donald Barthelme was American short-story writer known for his modernist “collages, ” which are marked by technical experimentation and a kind of melancholy gaiety. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania.
His interest in art led him to become a museum director in Houston in the 1950's. He later served as managing editor of the art and literary periodical Location. The main influence on his writing, both in form and theme, is the collage, an art of fragmentation, which he saw as the key to modern art. His works include the novels Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise (1986); numerous collections of short stories: Come Back Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Great Days (1979), Sixty Stories (1981), Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), Forty Stories (1987); and a book of parodies, Guilty Pleasures (1974). Barthelme is not concerned with plot, character, or theme. He constructs a formal design that is playful, inventive, and self-contained. For example, he takes a fairy tale like Snow White and transforms it subtly so that the conventional notions of heroism and salvation are inverted. His heroine is a strange creature who never develops or finds happiness. She laments at one point: "I have not been able to imagine anything better. " She recognizes that she is trapped - half-princess, half-"servant" - in a world not of her making. Barthelme is more successful than his heroine because he can imagine something better. In his best short stories "On Angels, " "Brain Damage, " "A Shower of Gold, " "Daumier" - he virtually changes our conception of the story. He includes drawings, "sermons, " and descriptions of figures from popular culture. Often, these are jumbled so that the reader is uncertain whether to take the fiction "seriously. " "On Angels" is perhaps his most characteristic story. It begins with a cosmic statement, "The death of God left the angels in a strange position. " The angels, like Snow White, are outcasts, unsure of their position in the universe. They must recreate themselves. They resemble Barthelme, who tries to invent new forms. Instead of a realistic story with the angels going about their business, Barthelme puts himself into the design. He tells us about angels "described" in various reference books. Finally, he returns to the baffled angels, showing that his imaginative details are more valid and entertaining than the old descriptions. The angels cannot reach any conclusion, any self-definition, but they accept one principle - they will continue to exist in an imperfect way. The story exemplifies Barthelme's feeling that life and fiction alike are on their own. "Barthelme died in Houston, July 23, 1989. His last work, The King, which teleports King Arthur and his Round Table into the nuclear age, was published posthumously in 1990.
( With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Don...)
( The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, ...)
(A collection of eleven astonishing short stories focus on...)
(An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fai...)
(Donald Barthelme's premature death at the age of fifty-ei...)
(When Mathilda discovers a mysterious Chinese house in her...)
( Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and in...)
("No other word for it: a charming book." Peter S. Prescot...)
(168 pages. Hardcover, first printing, bound in red cloth ...)
He married four times. His second wife, Helen Barthelme, later wrote a biography entitled Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, published in 2001. With his third wife Birgit, a Dane, he had his first child, a daughter named Anne, and near the end of his life he married Marion (Marion Knox/Barthelme), with whom he had his second daughter, Yekaterina. Marion and Donald remained married until his 1989 death from throat cancer.
