Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

A wonderful romp
This novel--although it really shouldn't be called that--is a wonderfully fragmented romp in the mud that is our bloated western culture. Don't go into this expecting an emotionally compelling narrative. While there are characters who do things, I'd hardly describe their actions as "plot," at least in the conventional sense. Moreover, though, I found my attachment to What Happened being continually, purposefully undercut.
The moment-to-moment thrill, however, is unmistakable. These were some of the most enjoyable passages (if cynically so) I've encountered in awhile. If you're in the mood for an assertive tour-de-force (which actually does NOT go on for too long at all--precisely because things ARE happening!...plus the book is pretty short, not to mention a quick read), try this one out!

Post-Modern Hoo-Hah
Being a huge Post-Modern fan, I thought Barthelme would exercise a little more of a central narrative to keep this book from spinning off into a nexus of half-consciousness, character self-reflexivity and general alienation.I did find that the true impetus of the book is in Snow White's hair which proves to be a driving erotic (if broken) symbol for the other characters in the book.The bold printed authoritive text has some nice gleamings of wisdom that remind me of the moral messages of fables, but sometimes seem too obtuse in their lack of connecting tissue between the episodic chapters of the book.I am going to read "The Dead Father" so my brain jury is still out on Barthelme's writing being up my alley.

Delightfully postmodern
"Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!" (from Snow White). This book changed my conception of what is possible in literature. Barthelme uses a well-known fairy tale to explore the nature of human relationships, in a satirical, creative, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny way. His literary allusions and facility with language are often as dizzying as the view from the skyscraper windows that Snow White's seven little men wash for a living. I highly recommend this book.

Uh
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
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. ... Read more

Product 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.Amazon.com Review
This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literaryoutput during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writercame to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, andother formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrotemany of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due tothe unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work,containing selections from eight previously published books, as wellas a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Surreal, tight and sometimes cryptic
About a third of the 60 stories are absolute gems, I have enjoyed so much that I read them twice just for the fun of it. Black humor at its best, cynical and surprising.
Another third I found difficult to read, too surreal even for one who likes the genre.
The last third...well, it's hard to decide: the prose is so tight, so concise... that it becomes almost cryptic.

Overall an interesting collection of an outstanding writer.

A feather, a stone, a tooth, a bit of uranium ore, an octopus sucker...
--Lets get right to the meat. People are busy. Did you like this book? Is it worth reading?

--Yes on both counts. "60 Stories" is a generous sampling of Bartheleme's work. You'll certainly discover whether he's to your liking or not based on what you're offered here. Because it bears saying that these stories are certainly not going to be everyone's cup of blue rooibos, to coin a phrase.

--How so? Why not?

--They aren't what most people would call "traditional" stories. It's somewhat inaccurate to call them "experimental" at this point since so many years have elapsed since they were written and published, so many years since the author died, and Barthelme's influence has been shaping literary experiments ever since, but a stunning number of readers still expect the short story to adhere to conventions established two or three centuries ago. I'd go back even further but the fact is that Barthelme's stories actually employ the conventions of what might be called the "original" short stories--fairy tales, myths, dreams, visions, and the like.

--In other words, they're non-linear, ambiguous, full of fantastic and illogical occurences.

--Yes, to name just a few. What's continually interesting about Barthelme is that every story--well, practically every story--is different in technique from the others. He attempts to find a mode of expression that suits what he wants to say and that changes from story to story. A hammer for a nail, a screwdriver for a screw. But more often, he invents new tools altogether. His stories are invented tools. So you never know quite what to expect when you begin a new story. A collection of Barthelme's stories is not like a box of saltine crackers. It's not even like a box of chocolates. It's like one of those Chinese boxes full of all sorts of tiny compartments, each with something different inside--a feather, a stone, a tooth, a bit of uranium, an octopus sucker...it could be anything.

--You never know what you're getting.

--Exactly. And that can be good or bad, depending on your taste. So in this collection there are stories you will love and others that won't appeal to you at all. It's a risky way to write and an exciting way to read...provided you want to be excited in that way. Lots of people like to know what they're getting beforehand. In life, in lovers, in stories. They read Hemingway because they like Hemingway. Story after story, Hemingway is a known quantity.

--Many people don't like irony either.

--And Barthelme's work is heavy with irony, World's Strongest Man type irony. If you aren't in good shape, the irony in these stories may be too heavy for you. It might crush you, that's how heavy the irony is. You might need a spotter.

--Okay, I get it. They're very ironic.

--Yes. But also heartfelt. Barthelme is a "double-minded" man, as most thinking folks are in this day and age. We see the shadow-side of every emotion we experience. The hate behind the love, the betrayal behind the loyalty, the resentment behind the generosity, etc. There's no such thing as a simple unalloyed motive, a true purity of heart. All expressions of such ring as insincere to our post-modern ears...they'd begun to ring that way to modern ears as well. What I'm trying to say is that irony, self-irony, is a way to get behind the mirror and the masks we wear on stage, it's a way to acknowledge that we can't be entirely truthful because we're always lying to one degree or another...it's a way of saying that we cannot say what we'd like to say, like being a prisoner of war paraded in front of a camera for propoganda purposes. We give a secret sign even while we're lying through our teeth, a kind of metaphorical wink that lets you know we can't tell the truth but we'd like to and we'd like you to know that. This is the function of the irony in Barthelme's stories, as I see it.

--Anything else?

--That's enough, I'd say. What more really needs to be said? Maybe only that its quite likely not possible to fully appreciate where cutting edge literature is today without reading Donald Barthelme, who directly influenced so much of it--a kind of bridge, he was, from someone like Beckett to what we have today.

--Well, that might have been worth saying.

--And it might not have. But I said it and I won't unsay it. I think I'll go make some more green tea. Good day.

1) Keep an open mind, 2) Definitely worth the [...]!
Donald Barthelme is undeservedly under-read, perhaps because of too much experimentation on the short story form. Not every reader would like this intentional emphasis on an inventive structure and imaginative setups--more than on plot and other aspects of conventional storytelling. Others argue that he puts premium on the imaginative structure and style more than the meat of the story itself.

But if one can keep an open mind, at least, Barthelme would definitely come out as a master stylist. And one would immediately recognize his tremendous influence on our now contemporary favorite authors like Dave Eggers and his bunch. .

This book combines, as stated in the title, that many short stories in one book. So shallow it seems, but you're getting not just quantity for your money, but also variety upfront.

Read the following first: Miss Mandible, Balloon, I bought a little city, Sergeant, These at least will take you to explore the other stories (some even more `experimental' than the others) in this anthology. Read them in abandon, not knowing the author's intention to explore and experiment on the form. You'll love the stories as they are. Funny nonsequiturs, turn of events, turn of phrases will completely surprise and satisfy you. Enjoyable as hell.

There's a blog that Ive read where Tobias Wolff (another fantasticshort story master) is saying that in short stories, unlike in novels, it is still possible to achieve perfection. I think "I bought a little city" is one example of perfection. And there are others almost close to perfection in this book. Definitely worth your [...] and that time for weekend afternoon reading.

master of parody, suspender of belief

My second reading of Sixty Stories, ten years past the first, revealed all that I had missed initially, and also much in the interval I suppose. This original writing bears little resemblance to traditional fiction; rather, it is fluidly synchronized fragments of surreality (although Barthelme himself parodied the notion of him being a "fragmatist" in one of his interviews).

Sixty Stories is the broadest overview of Barthelme's work from the 60's and 70's; many of these stories originally appeared in The New Yorker. The philosophical juxtaposes with the concrete details of waking life in these compositions, even as many seem to be dream constructions. Audaciously biting wit weaves through the cryptic non-sequiturs that litter the fictional terrain like lurking landmines; the characters manifest as the intransigent entities that fill the daily headlines.

These experiments in parody and travels to strange and fabled places are juxtaposed against the angst and turbulences that underpinned the second third of the twentieth century. A palpable suspension of belief is required of the reader as one traverses the obscurities in many of these bright pages. Some of the best stories, such as "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne" (where family life collides with an addiction to Scotch); "Our Work and Why We Do It" (life in a typesetting shop, the nature of which Don B. was thoroughly familiar with); and "The Sergeant" (with it's hilariously bizarre ending) - these well-crafted creations show the master at his absurdly best.

If well seasoned word-play and blackly humorous irony are disorienting for you, this guy may not be your man. However, if you can appreciate an imagination that compellingly impresses with originally inventiveness, Don B. will gladly take up lodging in your brain.

Parataxis

The Cloud Reckoner

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

MR BARTHELME
IS CURRENTLY BEING HELD IN A SECRET DETENTION FACILITY IN NEBRASKA TO PREVENT ANY FURTHER ABUSE OF THE NOOISPHERE.
...but you didn't hear it from me. ... Read more

Product 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.Amazon.com Review
Like the title says, here are 40 short works culled fromacross Barthelme's career. Along with the similarly titled 60 Stories, this bookprovides one of the best samplings currently in print of Barthelme'sunrivaled humor, his melancholy, the poetry of his line, and hisconsiderable intellect. It includes pieces such as the famous"Sentence," (a single, several-page-long, unfinishedsentence), "The Flight of Pigeons From the Palace," one ofthe writer's illustrated stories, and "Overnight To Many DistantCities." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Tree Fruits
Just over ten years ago a deeply righteous hombre with a handle to match--Omnipot, tray bong, non?--wrote right here on Amazon a nifty little five-star review of Mister Barthelme's Forty Stories. So here's the thing: the dude's opening paragraph mirrors so exactly what I myself wanted to say about my own recent encounter with the approximately fantastic Donald Barthelme that I'm going to go ahead and reprint the whole thing and hope Mister Pot doesn't sue me:

"I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and couple three times was even a little sad and one two times was made pensive with head on hand till I laughed and laughed and laughed and finished the story and read it again and laughed and laughed and laughed..."

That was me to a total tee too, right down to the last laugh. Seriously, that's the whole nine yards in a single nutshell right there, O-Dog, you sum up in extra fine what a confounded pleasure it is to be shot full of magic bullets by this particular Don. Kudos to yudos in any case, Omnipot, I literally could not have put it better myself. All I can add I guess is even if the rest of you punters out there only end up reading a couple of these sublime flash fictions try to make sure the ones you choose include The Genius, Sinbad, especially Sinbad, Chablis, Construction, Lightning, RIF, and Letters to the Editore--mini masterpieces each one, massy minor triumphs in comic brevity. This dude Donald indubitably knew wherefore his Sam and knew wherefore what's more his Flann too the cheeky old devil and these wide open channels condense here to sometimes thrillingly familiar effect. In The Explanation, for instance, a zippy little page-turner composed entirely of questions and answers and illustrated to boot with a big black square, Donny Boy even manages to miraculously conflate his two rightly revered Irish forebears into one hysterical question: "Is the bicycle dead?" Brilliant. Just in case I'll mention the stupendous Sinbad one more time coz this lethally funny word weapon had me in the crosshairs from the opening salvo. One last thing: skip the utterly charmless introduction by super sap Dave Eggers, it adds precisely nothing to the otherwise wacky and wonderful proceedings and seems animated mostly by a grotesque self-consciousness laced with the lamest light touch this side of Dave Barry. Oof sez I. Remember in The Simpsons when Radioactive Man was about to be engulfed in a giant wave of green toxic sludge and he yells out, "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"? Well Eggers here is the goggles. Or should that be are the goggles? Who cares, yank and flitter this witless dweeb's feeble farking flapdoodle and go directly to the straight dope by Don B. This wickedly funny wordy gurdy man is the prose equivalent of The King Biscuit Flower Hour and his shorty shorts are perfect jets of the purest japery--like the great Omnipot sez, read 'em and laugh and laugh and laugh...

angus kennedy
While very challenging and insightful, I found many of the stories to be superficially "cute" and a little self-indulgent. Not as satisfying as I thought it would be.

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

The Perfect Motivation
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
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. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A fine supplement for those who already own the original books
This volume of 45 stories completes the canonization of Donald B. If you already own each of his individual works, then this would be the only way to squeeze out a little more of his unique word magic. The rubric "previously uncollected" draws a surprising number of stories from *Come Back, Dr. Caligari* (1966), DB's first book of stories. If you haven't read that, go directly to Caligari, since his profound, twinkling, knowing humor is on perfect display, and the number of stories from Caligari excluded from either 60 Stories or 40 Stories may reveal Barthelme's own self-doubt regarding his freshman effort. If you already own the original books, some interesting items can be found: his first published story (many characters draw their names from typefaces, besides the beloved Baskerville); a couple of unpublished stories in various stages of polish; and several stories that are not in any of the collected volumes. Although the book description claims to include *Sam's Bar*, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast, the actual published version does NOT include that story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

unspeakable practices
I read "the school" in an anthology, and liked it.But I guess I'm too straight, as these stories are a bit off the wall to me...

Washington Post-Modernist Marsh
In my junior & senior years in college, I skipped studying to read Barthelme: alienation in the social swamp has altered actions. Barthelme's characters don't look @one another; they "regard" one another; they interpret dreams as easily as some whine about their bosses ("Madame Cherokee's Dream Book flew into his hand."). They "listened for loudness."

I still don't think I can explain what postmodernism is, but it can't be nearly as funny as Barthelme. Some of his finest "fragments" are here: "The President" ("Who is this person @, Miss Kagle, & what is he to you?"); "Report"; "Edward & Pia"; "Game"; & the mother fragment, "See the Moon" ("See the moon? It hates us."), an interior monologue to his unborn child ("little Gog").

Like so many writers, Barthelme's best stuff is squeezed into a few volumes: this is one of them.

A collection of surreal stories
"Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts" is a collection of 15 short stories by Donald Barthelme. The pieces contained are as follows: "The Indian Uprising," "The Balloon," "The Newspaper Here," Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," "Report," "The Dolt," "The Police Band," "Edward and Pia," "A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking," "Can We Talk," "Game," "Alice," "A Picture History of the War," "The President," and "See the Moon?". The collection as a whole is surreal, often bizarre, and often a lot of fun.

My favorites from this collection are as follows: "The Balloon," in which a giant balloon is inflated over Manhattan (this story in particular raises questions about the nature and meaning of art); "The Dolt," about a man "preparing to take the National Writers' Examination" (this one contains segments of a story-within-the-story); "The Police Band," about the hoped for "triumph of art over good sense"; "Game," a claustrophobic psychological study of two officers confined in what sounds like a missile launching site; and "See the Moon?", a warped look at parenthood and academia (this story has quite a bit of alliteration and amusing wordplay). This collection as a whole reveals Barthelme to be an inventive practitioner of the short story form. ... Read more

Product Description
"No other word for it: a charming book."—Peter S. Prescott, NewsweekSimon, a middle-aged architect separated from his wife, is given the chance to live out a stereotypical male fantasy: freed from the travails of married life, he ends up living with three nubile lingerie models who use him as a sexual object.

Set in the 1980s, there's a further tension between Simon's desire to exploit this stereotypical fantasy and his (as well as the author's) desire to treat the women as human beings, despite the women's claims that Simon can't distinguish between their personalities.

Employing a variety of forms, Barthelme gracefully plays with this setup, creating a story that's not just funny—although it's definitely that—but actually quite melancholy, as Simon knows that the women's departure is inevitable, that this "paradise" will come to an end, and that he'll be left with only an empty house, booze, and regrets about chances not taken. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Earnest but Affected
PARADISE was worth reading to the end, but I could hardly say there was any narrative drive to it.It's the story of an architect who's taking a year off, which he spends in a large apartment in New York City.Three young women (two blonds, one brunette) move in with him.

This has the makings of a dinner theater comedy, but it's not funny.The characters are articulate, but not terribly interesting.Imagine an episode of Seinfeld with no laughs, and that pretty well sums it up.

Sometimes the women spout feminist rhetoric.In some chapters Barthelme tosses in a few four letter words to spice up things.Occasionally we see intimate moments between the architect and the young lady which echo the Playboy philosophy.

Barthelme was a talented writer, but he seemed to be writing to get the approval of the New York literati.PARADISE is out of print.No great loss.

Paradise
When I was a kid we had a joke about cliches: we would always reply to someone unfortunate enough to utter one with: "Dear Penthouse, I never thought those letters were true, until..."It was our way of making fun of someone who said something that a million other people said exactly the same way.I remembered this because the first thing I thought to write about this book was something like: "Dear Amazon, I can't believe this book is out of print, because..."

Well, I can't believe this book is out of print.It's a fantastic book, difficult to describe.It's dreamy, it's poetic, it feels like a long short story, it feels like a novel, it's a middle-age fantasy, it's a middle-age damage report, it's honest, it's unrealistic, it's serious literature, it's easy to read, it's post-modern...

It's a fanastic book.I picked it up about 15 years ago in one of those All Books Only A Dollar places in a strip mall in Baton Rouge.I believe I picked it up because, yes, it was only a dollar, but also 'cause of the naked women on the front cover.That pleasure, as real as it was, of a racy cover has over the years given way to the greater pleasure of a really excellent book.

Barthelme is phenomenal
"Paradise", although out of print, is worth the search. Barthelme's neurotically postmodern and pre-millenial prose never fails to astonish in its originality.The completely unlikely tale of 53 year oldSimon, an architect from Philadelphia, and his three concubines is maderealistic through terrific dialogue and bang-on sarcastic humour. If youenjoy authors like Martin Amis or Russell Banks, "Paradise" isworth the trip to the library--or the wait until it is back in print. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (10)

alive and kicking
Though i must say i prefer his short stories, Don B has nothing short of a fab read here.

There was a point in the book where I realized in my head I had equated the DF to Bernie from 'Weekend at Bernie's'. If this isn't enjoyable, then I don't know what is.

It's been said that the perfect preface to the book is Plath's "Daddy" and I would have to agree.

the dead novel(maybe)
To call 'The Dead Father' a novel is a bit of stretch.It's more of a musing, a strange dream.What there is of a story here lacks focus.It's interesting for a bit, but grows tiresome.Perhaps the book's best part is a book within the book called 'The Manual for Sons', in which a number if differing father types are presented for satirical scrutiny:it's not a pretty picture; but it is entertaining.

The praise this novel receives is most likely attributed to its 'differentness', and given the time it was published, in the mid '70s, when there were plenty of calls for the death of the novel and such, and the continued march of post-modern games masquerading as novels, it's not surprising that the 'lit-heads' of the time were fascinated by this one.So if you like that sort of thing, this is for you.Otherwise try out Barthelme's short fiction first; it's far more rewarding - his true metier.

Funny in a funny way
Barthelme makes humor and complexity look simple in this perfect little book. One wonders what it might have been like to be a creative writing student of his. His use of Post Modern conventions is genuinely unique and he wields a story of just enough depth to keep the reader guessing where it might take him next, but always comfortable in the passenger seat of Barthelme's vehicle. The book takes the reader on a journey wherein a god is disposed of, simply that. But the humorous way it transpires captivates and complicates things. The word play is delicious. The style is clever, but not too much so for its own good. The book is a veritable delight.

Lackluster, Detached Novel
This novel is hard to read. It does not keep interest. The characters seems a remote from each other as the author seems from the reader. The style is James Joyce without the intellect and Monte Python without the wit. Save your time and skip this one.

Classic Barthelme
"The Dead Father" is a novel by Barthelme who is far more famous for his short stories. But fans of his short stories won't be surprised by anything in The Dead Father. All his trademarks are there: Long pages of odd dialogue, humorous lists, deadpan humor, metafiction, etc.

If you are new to Barthelme, I'd recommend "60 Stories" first (his short fiction is better), but "The Dead Father" is certainly the best of his 4 novels. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of stories by a master of deadpan wit and magical mockery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Barthelme's Amateur
Another outstanding collection of his writing. What more can I say. If you like his work, you won't be disappointed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

My introduction to Barthelme
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.

Postmodern short short stories
Story titles are:1.Views of My Father Weeping2.Paraguay3.The Falling Dog4.At the Tolstoy Museum5.The Policemen's Ball6.The Glass Mountain7.The Explanation8.Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel9.The Phantom of the Opera's Friend10.Sentence11.Bone Bubbles 12.On Angels13.Brain Damage14.City Life. Here you will find Postmodern short fiction with pictures attached.Prose poems, enigmas from the 1970's.

clever and crystalline
These cracked and conceptual stories hide a ruthless and skeptical analysis.So few innovative writers are readable.So few readable writers achieve something worth reading.The astounding formal innovations here are absolutely integral to the work.Barthelme feels like the smartest, funniest, most sarcastic person in your humanities seminar.An example of postmodern fiction that makes resentful continental postmodern criticism obsolete in advance.

To compare.Among modern American writers with ideas about American culture Pynchon competes but sometimes does less with more.These stories are stripped to the skeleton.The omnivorous imagination here is like Borges but the learning of obscure ancient cultures has been replaced by the obscurities of our equally arcane popular culture.

Unless you have to write a dissertation replace Foucault and Derrida with this on your reading list.You'll learn as much and you'll laugh instead of fighting the urge to go back in time and kill the analyst's parents.

A feather under the nose of liberal arts education.
"City Life" was my intro to Barthelme. I was stunned! Who was this guy, fusing commentary on psychoanalysis and morals with allusions to American TV commercials (Brain Damage)? Rewriting the classics (The Phantomof the Opera's Friend)? Barthelme wrote from perspective of the confoundedinnocent, astounded by pop culture: to paraphrase from In the TolstoyMuseum, I hope something vivifying happened to him there. ... Read more

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Product Description
In this novel, King Arthur is rediscovered - doing battle with the Nazis during the darkest period of World War II. Donald Barthelme is the author of three previous novels and several collections of short stories, notably, "Forty Stories" and "Sixty Stories". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Cheeky, But Shallow Romp with King Arthur in WWII England
"The King" is a tongue in cheek fable of King Arthur and his Round Table being transported to 1940 England. They rabble rouse away with all bravado while their exploits become fodder for the propaganda out of Nazi Germany.

Funny at times, but all the while I was wishing for a more what if? tale of King Arthur and his Knights doing battle in WWII Europe. Would have made for an interesting story...but, it would have been written by a different writer as this is more Barthelme's style.

Witty, original and easy-to-read
I was assigned this book to read for a class on Arthurian legends as part of one of the units entitled "The Arthur We Inherited." Because the book's been out of print so long, the professor had to photocopy it for all of us. Having read it, I can say that I'm so glad it seems to be back in print!

I read it in one night. The characters are fantastic, the dialogue is literally laugh-out-loud funny. It's such an original plotline. I can honestly say it's the best reading I had to do for that course, and certainly among the best novels I've ever read!

Read this.
I paid a dollar for this book.God Bless used bookstores who carry out-of-print titles on clearance.The King is probably flawless - I've read it 10 or 11 times now, and each time the language is always as freshas the previous reading.Donald Barthelme is indisputably the Alpha andOmega of contemporary American short fiction, and this is his very best. If you're not familiar with his stuff, go grab one of the anthologies (60or 40 Stories), find a good place to read, and become quietly enthralled.The fact that this book is out-of-print either testifies to the currentlifeless state of the publishing industry, or the existence of a cold,malevolent trickster-god.If you have personal contact with ANYONEinvolved in the publishing industry, PLEASE encourage them to read TheKing, to reproduce it, to lavish it with praise and vigorous marketing,etc.D.B. has slipped out of the American literary consciousness - if thatisn't an oxymoron - these last ten years, being instead cruelly relegatedto the pomp and ineffectual circumstance of that icy ninth ring of hell,THE LAND OF GRADUATE STUDIES.Unacceptable.Find this book, pay thesearch fee, abuse the mass-quantity machines at Kinko's, and leave copieson the street corners.Brighten a stranger's day.

I annoyed everyone around me with this book!
Donald Barthelme's "The King" is the loudest laugh I've ever had from a book!It is the tale of Arthur and his knights fighting World War II, though the tale is told primarily through these characters' sad and outdated dialogue.I read this book almost non-stop through breakfast at a coffee shop, a trounce through my favorite bookstore and then dinner, all the while grabbing anyone close at hand to read passages to.Nasty looks and possibly even violent reactions would not assuage me, for the humor, joy and pure inventiveness of Barthelme's writing kept me as humble and courteous as a chivalrous knight

You absolutely must find and buy and -- finally -- READ this
Hitler and King Arthur come to blows in this, a virtually dialogue-only novel.Absolutely incredible.Will be one of the top five novels you've ever read ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (8)

Great Bio
Writing easy to read and engaging. You only have to read one Barthelme story to wonder what the guy's life was like. This book delivers the goods.

Well-Written but the Last Third Is Perhaps Too Self-Censored
Daugherty's writing is definitely skillful and often beautiful. This is one of the best biographies I've read in a long time. I found the description of the relationship between Barthelme and Roger Angell, Barthelme's New Yorker editor, especially interesting--even shocking as a glimpse into that world. It would seem, from this narrative at least, that Barthelme's entire career was pretty much made by Angell, but that Barthelme was also enslaved to the New Yorker because of the curious fiscal practice of paying writers advances for future work, thus ensuring that the impoverished Barthelme would remain in debt to the famous magazine.

The last quarter or third of this book disappointed me. The writing became coy in terms of what was left out. After multiple discussions of the towering influence Barthelme's father had on him, and how Oedipal themes of patricide flourished in Barthelme's work, Daughtery never tells us how Barthelme Sr. reacted to Jr.'s work, alcoholism, and career ups and downs. Barthelme Sr. even outlived Jr., but Sr. basically disappears from the latter portion of the book. I got a strong sense that information was being withheld by the author, that probably Daughtery is protecting living members of the Barthelme family with whom he needed to collaborate to do as good of a job as he did.

In summary I would say this is a near-great book but it's marred by this possible self-censorship and withholding. Perhaps we'll have to wait for another couple of decades for another generation to produce the truly great Barthelme bio.

Education of an artistic sensibility
Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty's biography of Donald Barthelme, is an investigation of the education of an artistic sensibility.Barthelme never actually finished college, though he may have had enough credits for two BAs.The twelve years of Barthelme's life from eighteen to thirty are a long apprenticeship, working in journalism as his hero Hemingway did; going to Korea with the army and mostly reading; writing speeches for the president of the University of Houston; managing a great small magazine, Forum; directing the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art; moving to New York to run an art magazine for Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess.He didn't publish his own writing until he was well past 30.He really did read all of western Philosophy (as he told young writers to do for their own apprenticeships), as well as prodigiously in literature, before finally turning out his own product (he destroyed much of his "juvenile" writing, nearly all of what he'd done in his twenties).Any young writer would profit from a close study of Hiding Man, paying particular heed to what Barthelme read and asked family to send him when he was in the army in Korea--and to how he read, spider fashion from one book to the webs of other books connected to central texts.Daugherty's book is also an immensely sad story of a high functioning alcoholic and son of a fascinating, demanding, autocratic modernist architect father, whose regard and approval Barthelme never fully received or understood.Still, Hiding Man is instructive and heartening.This is how to describe a writer's life--tactfully, with the fiction as models for efficiency as well as for information about his life.The great surprise of Hiding Man is how much autobiography is available in Donald Barthelme's beautiful, quizzical, puzzle-piece stories and novels.This is a great book.

Barthelme and the canon, a repositioning~
Tracy Daugherty's "Hiding Man," the first biographical treatment of Donald Barthelme, provides a much needed re-evaluation of an author who soared to critical acclaim in the mid to late 1960's, with an entire issue of the New Yorker devoted to the publication of his first novel, Snow White (1967), only to succumb to a subsequent backlash with the growth of writing programs / MFA programs in the 1970's and 1980's and the Raymond Carver / New Realism mode adopted as the standard house style at Iowa and many other such places.

The Barthelme who emerges in these pages is neither the (early) critcal favorite nor the abstract postmodernist rendered in subsequent depictions, but instead a modernist with a dark, mordant sense of humor, and a surrealist's eye and ear for the judicious pastiche and juxtaposition, generating new meaning from context.

He is also a native Texan, with an architect father, who moves to New York for a lengthy period of time, before returning to Houston, and this narrative, too, places him with respect to the academy and his unrelenting humor.The subject of a recent NY Times piece on the short story as THE post-war American form (along with Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever), Donald Bartheleme remains as vital as the day "Me and Miss Mandible" first appeared: after this bio, start off with Dr. Caligari if Bartheleme is new for you--

Hiding Man Artfully Revealed
I can't imagine a better person to have written this first-rate biography of Donald Barthelme than Tracy Daugherty, who has brought his perspectives as writer, scholar, protege, friend, and person of integrity to bear on the artful revelation of one of our most important writers. Daugherty gives us a felt sense of the questions that drove Barthelme to become who he was and to make breakthroughs in language and consciousness. A student of Barthelme's at the same time as Tracy Daugherty, I can attest to his portrayal of Barthelme as mentor--demanding, generous, wise. But what fascinates me now, years later, is understanding Barthelme in the context of his time and as a shaper of new realities. Barthelme loved to put "a new thing into the world," and I can almost hear his clipped approval of Daugherty's biography of him, in all his complexity, brilliance, and humanness. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fun and obscure
This was a very fun children's book that left plenty of room for imagination.I'm a bit "old" for children's books at nearly 30 but I appreciate literature in virtually all forms; so I maintain this book is an imaginative joy.

The Story Can't Unite the Hithering Thithering Graphics
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, staring impassively 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 clearly 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 this is not even a children's book. While The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine is not a great children's book, children can find some enjoyment in it. --There, I think I've managed to annoy both the Barthelme clique and the children's-books clique.

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!
... Read more

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Viewed in it's context of upscale New York, the art circuit and "The New Yorker", the canon of Barthelme's work is an invaluble repository of the literary, philosophical, political and cultural ecology of his time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

What Donald Barthelme Achieved
Review of Michael Hudgens' Donald Barthleme: Postmodernist American Writer
By Roger E. Dendinger, Ph.D.
Comparing writers to visual artists, William S. Burroughs once said that writing is fifty years behind painting. From a Burroughsian perspective, painters successfully deal with technological change and resulting cultural stresses because they work outside the straightjacket of language. With mere words as the base material of their art, writers face constraints of linear narrative and logical representation unknown to painters. (Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word describes the dilemma of abstract and conceptual artists who rely on textual explanation and commentary.) As Michael Hudgens makes clear in Donald Barthleme: Postmodernist American Writer, Barthelme's achievement in overcoming the "backwardness" of writing was won in the aesthetic battleground over the nature of narrative and representation. Hudgens explicates two of Barthelme's best known novels, The Dead Father and Snow White, and the short story, "Paraguay," a work considered emblematic of literary postmodernism by both sides in this debate - by critics who scorn postmodernism as chaotic or willfully difficult and by those sympathetic to the need for exploring heterogeneous forms of expression. The nature of cultural postmodernism is a significant sub-theme of the study, and here Hudgens makes a valuable contribution to the theoretical standoff between postmodernism and its critics. He identifies elements of Barthelme's work that contrast starkly with tenets of high modernist criticism, explicating them in the context of Barthelme's stated goals as a writer. In a key chapter, he traces Barthelme's development of the technical innovations of Joyce and makes a convincing case for viewing Joyce's experimental works as a Rosetta stone for deciphering Barthelme and, by extension, other postmodernists.
Rather than diving into the theoretical debate over postmodernism (a profitless undertaking at best), Hudgens uses the outlines of the debate as a frame for explication. He avoids the semantic hairsplitting of language philosophy and the willful obscurantism of much post-structural cultural criticism, focusing instead on the bedrock material of traditional literary scholarship - the artist's own words and works. An example of Hudgens' method is his reference to Barthelme's interest in architectural theory, where the debate between modernists and postmodernists has produced manifestos on both sides. Barthleme's interest in architecture was both personal - his father was an architect - and philosophical. He found a corollary to his own linguistic pioneering in the contemporary theoretical struggle within architecture, a struggle pitting practitioners of established formal approaches against innovators seeking new expressive possibilities. Much as "po-mo architects" seek alternatives to the inherited language of 20th century architecture, Barthelme sought new ways of expressing his own brand of literary realism. As in other manifestations of post-modernism, the defining feature of postmodern architecture is, in the words of Fredrick Jameson, the "effacement of the frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture." High modernism in architecture is associated with Utopianism, elitistism, and authoritarianism and is credited with destroying the urban fabric of traditional neighborhoods by transplanting Utopian structures and plans into the context of pre-modern cities. Le Corbusier's statement that "architecture has for its first duty...bringing about a revision of values" may be seen as the ultimate expression of high modernist values in the realms of architecture and city planning. This magisterial view is countered by one of Bartheleme's artistic touchstones, the architect and critic, Robert Venturi, whose postmodernism presents itself as a brand of architectural populism. Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas is widely regarded as one of postmodernism's most lucid declarations. In it, he celebrates eclectic diversity and scorns the unidirectional methodology of modern architects and planners. Is a particular work a "magisterial pronouncement," a "master-narrative" in the tradition of high modernism? Is it the product of a literature of inclusion, of healthy populism, heterogeneity? Is it, that is, Venturi-like? Or, as critics such as Frederick Jameson contend, is post-modernism a faux populism with a deeply disguised political agenda? The literary critic's task is to untangle these and other issues. By combining pertinent details of Barthelme's biography with a New Critic's view of literature as an internally unified structure of meaning, Hudgens avoids theoretical campaigning and illuminates the tension in Barthleme's work between tradition and Ezra's Pound's old directive - make it new.

Barthelme's place in pomo
Review of Donald Barthelme, Postmodern American Writer By John J. Dunn, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Hudgens has written a scholarly and provocative book on Donald Barthelme and his position in the cultural phenomenon called Postmodernism. He has succeeded very well in analyzing Barthelme's often difficult fiction and relating it to other significant examples of Postmodernism in literature and art.

For example, his analysis of the innovative story "On Angels" is unusually perceptive. It reveals how Barthelme tries to come to terms with traditional theology in an age which often questions the existence of God. Obviously, Barthelme has been strongly influenced by his Catholic background, particularly Thomism (the five "proofs" for the existence of God, etc.). Hudgens comments cogently on both the wit and the experimental technique of this startling story. Calling The Dead Father Barthelme's best novel, he provides a detailed exegesis of this brilliant, complex work-a haunting fictional examination of the ambiguities which drive family relationships. In this chapter, Hudgens authenticates the accuracy of the author's assertion that he sought "a meditation upon external reality" in his fiction.

Besides providing clear and explicit analyses of Barthelme's novels and short stories, Hudgens traces the similarities between this fiction and other works associated with Modernism and Postmodernism. He reveals, for instance, a deep understanding of James Joyce and his many-faceted contributions to Twentieth Century literature. His tudy of "The Dead" constitutes perhaps the most powerful and insightful segment of his book. He is also obviously a member of that distinguished minority of literary scholars who actually understand Finnegans Wake. . . .

Hudgens expertly refutes many of the broader criticisms of Postmodernism contained in John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978). He is fair-minded and judicious in his response to this controversial work, but he makes a convincing case that Gardner grossly underestimates the seriousness and substantiality of much Postmodernist literature and art.

Aside from its honest and meticulous scholarship, Donald Barthelme: Postmodernist American Writer is unusually readable for a scholarly tom of this sort. Quotations are carefully selected and are integrated smoothly into the text. Hudgens' style is lucid, often even elegant and witty. He manages to avoid the tortured syntax and overly cerebral vocabulary of many learned works of criticism. Furthermore, he is never afraid to use humor or irony when a lighter note is appropriate.

Donald Barthelme: Postmodernism American Writer is a major critical study of an increasingly respected fiction writer. It will be a valued addition to the growing body of scholarship surrounding Barthelme's writing and its position in the Postmodernist movement. ... Read more

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