60 Stories (Penguin Classics LiteratureSeries) FROM THE PUBLISHER
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.
FROM THE CRITICS
Anatole Broyard
"Donald Bathelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Henningway and O'Hara did in theirs. 60 Stories is a whole earth catalog of life in our time." -- The New York Times
Anne Tyler
"If you read straight through these stories you're bound to be struck by the volume's cohesiveness. Donald Bathelme's writing is from the outset firm and sure, entirely his own. He experiments as freely nowadays as he did when younger, and his experiments reaveal a rare exhuberance, an unfaiing joy in words and possibilities." -- Detroit News
Guy Davenport
"Bathalme can focu our feeling into a bright point that can raise a blister. These 60 stories show him inventing at full pitch." -- Washington Post
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