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.
This book includes selected stories from eight of Barthelme's previous collections published between 1964 and 1979--many of which are now out of print--and nine previously uncollected stories. Over the years his stylistic innovations have had a wide influence on short story authors and have inspired many imitators, but this collection demonstrates how consistent and singular Barthelme's originality truly was.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Themes, Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: Classics, Literary, Literary Genres + Types of Novels
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Pages: 480
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: October 1, 2003
- Date Published: October 1, 2003
- Author: Donald Barthelme