Flying to America: 45 More Stories

Flying to America: 45 More Stories

Donald Barthleme, Kim Herzinger (Editor), Kim Herzinger (Preface by)
$17.95
Publication Date: March 13th, 2018
Publisher:
Counterpoint
ISBN:
9781619029996
Pages:
352
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the 20th century. In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd and strange into the real in his usual epiphanic, engaging, and richly textured style. The stories delve further into themes that often interested Barthelme: the perils of the unfulfilled existence; the relationships between politics, art, sex, and life; and the importance of continuing to ask questions even though we are unable to learn the answers. This collection will delight both old fans and new readers.

About the Author

Donald Barthelme is a winner of the National Book Award and is the author of over seventeen books, including Flying to America, City Life (one of Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year), and Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was a founder of the renowned University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he taught for many years. He died in 1989.

Kim Herzinger is a critic who writes on minimalism and other contemporary literary phenomena, a Pushcart Prize–winning writer of fiction, and the editor of two other Donald Barthelme collections, Not–Knowing and The Teachings of Don B. He taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and now owns and operates Left Bank Books in New York City."

Praise for Flying to America: 45 More Stories

Praise for Flying to America

“It is possible . . . to trace [in Flying to America] the author’s development from an early postmodern baroque . . . to the fragmentary, almost minimalist style of his late–’60s and early–’70s prime.” —Los Angeles Times

“Flying to America’s Barthelmanian treasures: three previously unpublished stories, one of which he was working on at his death; his first published story (1959); the winning entry of a contest in which the author asked readers to finish a story of which he’d written the first three paragraphs; and a bunch of masterful work from The New Yorker . . . some of these stories—‘Flying to America,’ ‘Three,’ ‘Tickets’—were among his very best.” —New York Magazine “Donald Barthelme . . . creates a crowd of characters whose struggle ‘ill–advised’ optimism and struggle for meaning mirror his own life’s effort.” —Chicago Tribune

“Barthelme's legacy resides as much in his sensibility as in the stories themselves. His style melded the personal and the political with reams of detailed book learning. It's likely a combination of those elements—the confessional, polemical and esoteric (I quiver to think what Barthelme would have done with the Internet)—that people are responding to in his work today. He may have been radical in his time, but he's perfectly suited to our own.” —Houston Chronicle

“Most of these stories have the signature style that made Barthelme as pervasive through the ’60s as Peter Max—the dialogue that never quite connects, as if two people are talking past each other, the non sequiturs that suggest that literary cause–and–effect is merely artifice, an exercise in absurdity . . . There is the first story that he ever published, using a pseudonym (‘Pages from the Annual Report’), and the last that he published in the New Yorker (‘Tickets’) just months before his 1989 death.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Barthelme (1931–1989) was one of the great 20th–century American absurdists . . . Barthelme’s funhouse mirrors reflect the world’s tragicomic essence.” —Publishers Weekly