45 Inspiring Travel Stories: Adventure Tales for Your Next Trip to America | Perfect for Travel Enthusiasts & Dreamers
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Product Description
Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century. Through his unique, richly textured, and brilliantly realized novels, stories, parodies, satires, fables, and essays, Barthelme redefined a generation of American letters. To John Hawkes, he was one of our greatest of all comic writers.” Robert Coover called him one of our great citizens of contemporary world letters.” And to Thomas Pynchon, who coined the term Barthelismo, his work conveyed something of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”This collection presents all of Barthelme's previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, as well as work not published in his two compendium editions, Sixty Storiesand Forty Stories. Highlights of Flying to America include three unpublished stories, Among the Beanwoods,” Heather,” and Pandemonium”; fourteen stories never before available in book form-from his first published story, Pages from the Annual Report” (1959), to his last, Tickets” (1989); and the long out-of-print Sam's Bar, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast. With Flying to America, fans and new readers alike have the huge pleasure of a new collection from one of America's great literary masters.
Customer Reviews
This collection contains stories not included in Barthelme’s landmark collections 60 Stories and 40 Stories, as well as uncollected stories, unpublished stories, and stories later incorporated into his late novel, Paradise. In other words, this isn’t the Don B. book you read first (that’s 60 Stories), or even fourth (don’t miss The Dead Father or Snow White). This book is for committed, die-hard enthusiasts, those who wish to read every last dang thing. That said, there are stories in this volume that are as weird, grand, and fun as their more celebrated canonical brethren.I read Barthelme for his sentences, for zany unpredictable more-is-more brilliance, and not one of these stories is bereft of the Master’s touch, even when the overall effect may not be as successful. Since when do I read him for the overall? For those of us fascinated by Barthelme, it’s interesting to see what DIDN’T quite work, especially in runaway stories like “Hiding Man” that are as excruciating as they are brilliant. Over and over (and over and over) Don B. cruises past one elegant ending after the next, like a car that misses its exit, then 5 exits more, until you begin to panic, until you want to shout, “Help! I’ve been kidnapped by Donald Barthelme! Somebody get me the hell out of this story!” Several of the long stories collected here are like that -- like watching your most brilliant friend descend (ascend?) into mania.Recognizing that life is short and uncertain and doesn’t include nearly enough time for reading, here’s a list of the 12 stories in this volume that I found most interesting, entertaining, or necessary: Perpetua; The Piano Player; Henrietta and Alexandra; Three; Hiding Man; You Are Cordially Invited; Belief; Heather; The Sea of Hesitation; To London and Rome; The Apology; Florence Green is 81.
