CRITICAL MASS (Free subscription) | 09/30/2008
Contestants Don Breckenridge , James Marcus and Lizzie Skurnick playing the "Name that Author" game (Lizzie: "Donald Barthelme! James and I say Donald Barthelme!")
Emdashes (Free subscription) | 09/18/2008
Last week, I linked to Donald Barthelme's 81-book syllabus . Now I offer a top-ten list from David Foster Wallace, for those of you who, like Martin and me, are trying to come to grips with his suicide—or trying to learn more about who he was. The list comes courtesy of J. Peder Zane in The New York Observer :
Emdashes (Free subscription) | 09/09/2008
It's back-to-school time, so it seemed appropriate to link to an 81-book syllabus Donald Barthelme used to give out to his students. (It appears in the margins of a nice 2003 essay by Keith Moffett in The Believer about his experience of tackling the list.) If that's too much for you, then I recommend you read Barthelme's hilarious and thought-provoking story, "The School," which appeared in The New...
Through the Prism (Free subscription) | 08/28/2008
. . . Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity. Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites...
Quillblog (Free subscription) | 08/22/2008
Herman Melville was for them; Raymond Chandler was against. Donald Barthelme thought they were “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” His contemporary, Kurt Vonnegut, called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Yet another commentator, grammar enthusiast James Kilpatrick, attacks them as “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation...
Colin McEnroe | To Wit (Free subscription) | 06/24/2008
My old friend Fred Pfiel, God rest his soul, had a phrase: "end of the world fun." He claimed to have derived it from a Donald Barthelme short story in which civilization is breaking down and there are people at a...
The Reading Experience (Free subscription) | 06/03/2008
The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up. In it you'll find all the usual good stuff, as well as an essay on Donald Barthleme by yours truly. . . .One of the pleasures of reading Barthelmes' stories as...
Art Deadlines List (Free subscription) | 05/30/2008
Announcing Conversations with Barthelme: A Festival of Adaptions of the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme. This inaugural Directors' Lab will explore the work of National Book Award winner Donald Barthelme, master of the absurdist short story. CRS will select six writer/directors to adapt and direct one short story each from Barthelme's famed collection 60 Stories. The six works will be presented
Campaign for the American Reader (Free subscription) | 05/15/2008
The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Justin Taylor, editor of The Apocalypse Reader and Come Back, Donald Barthelme. Two books mentioned in the entry: Vertigo by W.G. Sebald.... Sebald is one of my favorite writers. Vertigo wasn't great, at least not compared to his other books, at least two of which are bar-none masterpieces (those would be The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants),
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
Michael Chabon showed up for the creative writing program at University of California-Irvine in the mid-1980s with a head full of Italo Calvino , Jorge Luis Borges , and Donald Barthelme ... but also J.G. Ballard , Michael Moorcock , and Ursula K. LeGuin . The plan, he told me as we chatted in a hotel bar last week, was to write "intensely literary fiction that was equally steeped in genre," but he...
The Reading Experience (Free subscription) | 04/18/2008
Donald Barthelme, from a 1980 interview conducted by Larry McCaffery (included in Not-Knowing: The Essays and the Interiews): McCaffery: It's very obvious in Snow White--and in nearly all your fiction--that you distrust the impulse to "go beneath the surface" of...
The Reading Experience (Free subscription) | 04/11/2008
From Donald Barthelme's story, "Report," published in book form (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts) in 1968: . . .I said that ten thousand of our soldiers had already been killed in pursuit of the government's errors. I said that tens of...
The Nation Blogs (Free subscription) | 04/09/2008
Joanna Scott | The nonsensical funhouse of Donald Barthelme's fiction celebrates the cosmic joke of life and the pathos of grappling with it.
Isak (Free subscription) | 02/13/2008
Over at Bookforum, James Wolcott uses to the occasion of newly-published fiction to remember one of the greatest of storywriters, Donald Barthelme--and to reflect on the context which uncommon stories appear, be they alongside luxury carpet ads in The New...
A Tiny Revolution (Free subscription) | 02/11/2008
People like me whose minds have been permanently altered by Donald Barthelme will deeply enjoy this new James Walcott essay about King Weirdo. The horrors waited outside patiently. Even policemen, the horrors thought. We get even policemen, in the end....
