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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse: Chapter the Last, featuring...
Previously, Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43 Stories 42-37 Stories 36-31 Stories 30-25 Stories 24-19 Stories 18-13 Stories 12-7 Stories 6-1 I don’t know if there’s a need for a defense of...
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Barthelme/Calvino/Garner/Jackson (Books acquired, 19 Nov. 2021)
Spent a spare hour this afternoon at the local used bookshop. A few months ago I found a first edition of Donald Barthelme’s collection Forty Stories. This afternoon I picked up a first edition of my...
View Article“Food”— Donald Barthelme
Food I was preparing a meal for Celeste-a meal of a certain elegance, as when arrivals or other rites of passage are to be celebrated. First off there were Saltines of the very best quality and of a...
View ArticleDonald Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising,” but just the punctuation
. . , . . . . ” ? ” , , – . . ” . ” , . . . , . , , , , – . . . ” ‘ ‘ ‘ ? ” ” ? ” ” . ” ” , ” . ” , , , . ” ” ? ” ” , ” , ” . ” , , , : ? ? – . , , , , . , , , ( ) , , . , , ; ; – ; – – & , , , , ,...
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Read Donald Barthelme’s uncollected short story “The Ontological Basis of Two”
Donald Barthelme published a short story called “The Ontological Basis of Two” under the pseudonym “Michael Houston” in the June, 1963 issue of Cavalier, a “men’s” magazine. In her biography Donald...
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Sunday equinox blog | Atlanta, Di Benedetto, a Paley poem, ghosting William...
My spring break, which is to say the spring break of the community college which employs me to teach English, rarely coincides with my children’s spring break, but this year it did, and we took full...
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Four Books (Barthelme, Burroughs, and Barry [Hannah])
If you follow this blog even semi-regularly, you may know that I frequently frequent Chamblin Bookmine. This sprawling bookstore, with an inventory of close to three million books (mostly used, and...
View ArticleSome people found the balloon “interesting”| Donald Barthelme
There were reactions. Some people found the balloon “interesting.” As a response this seemed inadequate to the immensity of the balloon, the suddenness of its appearance over the city, on the other...
View ArticleRead “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace,” a very short story by Donald...
“The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace” by Donald Barthelme In the abandoned palazzo, weeds and old blankets filled the rooms. The palazzo was in bad shape. We cleaned the abandoned palazzo for ten...
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Don was there, as well as William Gass, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, and...
The New Yorker: Last week, there was a three-day festival in your honor at Brown University, in Providence—titled, in part, “Celebrating the Unspeakable Practices of Robert Coover”—featuring...
View ArticleDonald Barthelme’s meal of a certain elegance
Food I was preparing a meal for Celeste-a meal of a certain elegance, as when arrivals or other rites of passage are to be celebrated. First off there were Saltines of the very best quality and of a...
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Blog about some recent books acquired, other stuff
I read Will Oldham’s book On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy almost a decade and it therefore doesn’t belong in a stack of recent acquisitions, but it’s there—I pulled it off the shelf last week and thumbed...
View Article“The Temptation of St. Anthony,” a short story by Donald Barthelme
“The Temptation of St. Anthony” by Donald Barthelme YES, THE saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable. I think that’s quite...
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You don’t consciously see yourself as John Barth, the postmodernist?
Q: You don’t consciously see yourself as John Barth, the postmodernist? JOHN BARTH: Oh no, no, and the term now has become so stretched out of shape. I did a good deal of reading on the subject for a...
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John Barth’s brief description of Donald Barthelme’s so-called postmodernist...
Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner,” 1983 by Jill Krementz (b. 1940) In John Barth’s 1989 New York Times eulogy for Donald Barthelme, Barth gives a brief description of two so-called...
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Mass-market Monday | Donald Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unspeakable Acts
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Donald Barthelme. Bantam Books, first edition, first printing (1969). No cover artist credited. 165 pages. While there is no artist credited for the frenetic,...
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