Overnight to Many Distant Cities


Book Description

" ... Donald Barthelme's new collection ... takes us from New York to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Barcelona to Paris to the Radiant City of Le Corbusier, balancing twelve of his widely celebrated short stories against an equal number of brief visionary texts, new in his work, that provide a lovely, haunting counterpoint"--From dust jacket.




Donald Barthelme


Book Description

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) is regarded as one of the most imitated and influential American fiction writers since the early 1960s. In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Jerome Klinkowitz presents both an appreciation and a comprehensive examination of the life work of this pathbreaking contemporary writer. A blend of close reading, biography, and theory, this retrospective—informed by Klinkowitz’s expert command of postmodern American fiction—contributes significantly to a new understanding of Barthelme’s work. Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme’s short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted. Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme’s work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme’s life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz’s analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme’s critical importance in the literature of our times.




The Teachings of Don B.


Book Description

"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




The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism


Book Description

What is 'deconstruction'? What authors are considered 'postmodern novelists'? The Routledge Companion to Postmodernismcombines a series of fourteen in-depth background chapters with a body of A-Z entries to create an authoritative, yet readable guide to the complex world of postmodernism. Following full-length articles on postmodernism and philosophy, politics, feminism, lifestyles, television, and other postmodern essentials, readers will find a wide range of alphabetically-organized entries on the people, terms and theories connected with postmodernism, including: Peter Ackroyd; Jean Baudrillard; Chaos Theory; Death of the Author; Desire; Fractals; Michel Foucault; Frankfurt School; Generation X; Minimalism; Poststructuralism; Retro; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; and Trans-avant-garde. Students interested in any aspect of postmodernist thought will find this an indispensable resource.




Nothing But You


Book Description

Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Mavis Gallant, Julian Barnes, Michael Chabon, Jamaica Kincaid, John O'Hara, Muriel Spark, Ann Beattie, and William Maxwell are among the contributors to Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker--assembled by Roger Angell, senior editor at The New Yorker. This is the first fiction anthology in more than three decades from the magazine that has defined the American short story for almost a century. As noteworthy for its range as for its excellence, Nothing But You features a stunning array of present and past masters writing about love in all its varieties, from the classic love story to dislocated narratives of weird modern romance. Taken separately, these stories suggest the infinite variety of the human heart. Taken together, they are a literary milestone, a comprehensive review of the way we live and love now.




American Catholic Arts and Fictions


Book Description

Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.




American Fiction Since 1940


Book Description

In this remarkable book, Tony Hilfer provides a major survey of the wealth of post-war American fiction. He analyses the major modes and genres of writing, from realist to postmodernist metafiction and black humour, the fiction of social protest, women's writing, and the traditions of African-American, Southern and Jewish-American fiction. Key writers discussed include William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. The book concludes by exploring contemporary trends through detailed case-studies of Donald Barthelme and Toni Morrison.




Contemporary American Fiction


Book Description

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.




The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story


Book Description

Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as "Working Class Stories" or "Gay and Lesbian Stories." The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.




Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories (LOA #343)


Book Description

The definitive collection of a twentieth-century master of the short story, whose unforgettable inventions revolutionized the form The short stories of Donald Barthelme, revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention and pathos that have dazzled and delighted readers since the 1960s. Here, for the first time, these essential stories are preserved as they were published in Barthelme's original collections, beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), a book that made a generation of readers sit up and take notice. Collected Stories also includes the work that appeared for the first time in Barthelme's two retrospective anthologies, Sixty and Forty, as well as a selection of uncollected stories. Discover, in this comprehensive gathering, Barthelme's unique approach to fiction, his upside-down worlds that are nonetheless grounded in fundamental human truths, his scrambled visions of history that yield unexpected insights, and his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, which was for him "the central principle of all art in the twentieth century." Engage with sophisticated works of fiction that, often in just the space of a few pages, wrest profundities out of what might first seem merely ephemeral, even trivial. And experience, along with Barthelme's imaginative and frequently subversive ideas, the pleasures of a consummate stylist whose sentences are worth marveling at and savoring. Introduced with a sharp and discerning essay by editor Charles McGrath and annotation that clarifies Barthelme's freewheeling, wide-ranging allusions, the landmark volume is a desert-island edition for fans and the ideal introduction to new readers eager to find out why, as Dave Eggers writes, Barthelme's "every sentence ... makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways."