Sixty Stories

by Barthelme, Donald; Gates, David

• ISBN13: 9780142437391
• ISBN10: 0142437395
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-30
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Margins	p. 1
A Shower of Gold	p. 7
Me and Miss Mandible	p. 17
For I'm the Boy	p. 29
Will You Tell Me?	p. 37
The Balloon	p. 46
The President	p. 52
Game	p. 56
Alice	p. 61
Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning	p. 68
Report	p. 78
The Dolt	p. 83
See the Moon?	p. 90
The Indian Uprising	p. 102
Views of My Father Weeping	p. 109
Paraguay	p. 121
On Angels	p. 129
The Phantom of the Opera's Friend	p. 132
City Life	p. 137
Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel	p. 154
The Falling Dog	p. 163
The Policemen's Ball	p. 169
The Glass Mountain	p. 172
Critique de la Vie Quotidienne	p. 177
The Sandman	p. 185
Traumerei	p. 193
The Rise of Capitalism	p. 198
A City of Churches	p. 203
Daumier	p. 208
The Party	p. 225
Eugenie Grandet	p. 230
Nothing: A Preliminary Account	p. 239
A Manual for Sons	p. 243
At the End of the Mechanical Age	p. 267
Rebecca	p. 275
The Captured Woman	p. 280
I Bought a Little City	p. 290
The Sergeant	p. 297
The School	p. 304
The Great Hug	p. 308
Our Work and Why We Do It	p. 312
The Crisis	p. 318
Cortes and Montezuma	p. 323
The New Music	p. 332
The Zombies	p. 345
The King of Jazz	p. 349
Morning	p. 354
The Death of Edward Lear	p. 359
The Abduction from the Seraglio	p. 363
On the Steps of the Conservatory	p. 367
The Leap	p. 374
Aria	p. 381
The Emerald	p. 384
How I Write My Songs	p. 413
The Farewell	p. 419
The Emperor	p. 424
Thailand	p. 428
Heroes	p. 432
Bishop	p. 438
Grandmother's House	p. 444
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