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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23497 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-30
• Released on: 2003-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

About the Author
Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) published twelve books, including two novels and a prize-winning children's book. He was a regular contributor to the New Yorker and taught creative writing at the University of Houston. In his career, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, among others.

David Gates is a book critic at Newsweek. He is the author of three acclaimed works of fiction.

Customer Reviews

Donald Barthelme - 60 Stories
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.

Barthelme is one of a kind.
Donald Barthelme is probably the inimitable writer of the twentieth century and this collection is the best way to introduce yourself to his works. Included are selections from eight volumes he published between the years of 1964 and 1979 as well as a number of previously uncollected stories. What stikes one most about this collection is the sustained brilliance over the course of all 60 inclusions. While not every story is a classic and not every story hits the bullseye one has to admire the ambition packed and effort with which each is attempted, especially when one considers that few exist in a framework of more than six or seven pages. The stories in this collection that do work, and they are in the far majority, are startling in their ability to catch the reader off guard and deliver their short, compact punch. "Game", "A City of Churches" and "The School" are among these highlights, beautiful in their ability to transmit their message with such clarity and intensity, yet with such ease, virtuosity and good humor.

All that said, I feel I should qualify this review by saying that Barthelme is rarely easy reading. His narratives are so remarkably compact and so tightly wound that reading one straight through is something quite akin to venturing through an underwater cave, not coming up for air until the very end. It can be a difficuly experience, requiring intense concentration but the payoff is very worth the effort.

Brilliant but not for Everyone
Judgments about Barthelme remind me of how subjective criticism of literature is. Is he a genius or a fraud? One thing is for certain: if you do not have a taste for the absurd you are probably not going to like Barthelme. His stories are filled with absurdist/surrealist elements. But for me, what separates him from other "experimental" writers is his ability to elicit emotion from the reader. For example, when I first read the ending of "The Balloon", I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. And I couldn't say exactly why. Same with "The School." But there is something about his writing that works on the precognitive level. Unlike some reviewers, I don't find anything chilly or removed about his writing. There seems to be a genuine sympathy for his characters, even when placed in the most ludicrous of circumstances. So I line up on the genius side. And by the way, he's flat out the funniest writer I know of. 60 Stories is a good place to start if you're interested but if you like it, also check out 40 Stories, which features simpler writing.