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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. "From the Trade Paperback edition.
"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."
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.
"Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make 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 Sixty-three rare or previously uncollected works by a master of the American short story form *A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. *A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem "Big Bull" de Kooning. *A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your 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-seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. 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. "A small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language." -The New York Times Book Review "Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme's ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it." -Los Angeles Times
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.
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