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Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories

Edited by Charles McGrath

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Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Donald Barthelme, “The School”
April 7, 2022

Interviews “You’re not reading your grandfather’s short story”— Charles McGrath on the fiction of Donald Barthelme
August 16, 2021

The stories of Donald Barthelme are wonders of invention, compression, and imaginative brilliance that revolutionized the American short story in the 1960s and ’70s. Unpredictable, slyly subversive, and often hilarious, Barthelme’s work displays a restless artist’s mind engaging contemporary life’s complexities and speculating on the human place in the world through the adventure of writing, “a process,” he once remarked, “of dealing with not-knowing.” In his fusion of psychological distance and emotional impact, his use of collage and ambiguity, and the lasting aftereffects of even his most enigmatic creations, Barthelme invites comparison with Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka and such towering modern visual artists as Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso.

This Library of America edition of Barthelme’s stories is the largest and most comprehensive ever published. It restores to print the original book collections he meticulously selected and arranged, now iconic volumes that, like the era’s classic LPs, are best experienced whole. From the stunning debut Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) to the late-career explorations of Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), these collections unfold with inimitable Barthelmean logic, mischievousness, and bittersweetness.

Also gathered here are stories from Barthelme’s own retrospectives Sixty Stories and Forty Stories as well as pieces left uncollected at the time of his death in 1989. Editor Charles McGrath’s introduction offers a discerning assessment of Barthelme’s career, and the volume’s extensive annotations clarify the freewheeling, wide-ranging allusions, running the gamut from high to pop culture, scattered throughout his work.

Time and again these stories reveal, in the space of just a few pages, how Barthelme’s singular creative alchemy led him to wrest profundities out of the seemingly ephemeral, even trivial. “Barthelme distrusted,” as McGrath observes in his introduction, “the means of traditional fiction but not its end—to help make sense of things. . . . There’s always another day in Barthelme, a redemptive sense of open-endedness, and a belief that small miracles are sometimes possible.”

Charles McGrath, editor, is a writer at large at The New York Times, and was formerly editor of The New York Times Book Review and deputy editor of The New Yorker. He is also the editor of the Library of America edition, John O’Hara: Stories.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Charles McGrath

COME BACK, DR. CALIGARI
Florence Green is 81
The Piano Player
Hiding Man
Will You Tell Me?
For I’m the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You
The Big Broadcast of 1938
The Viennese Opera Ball
Me and Miss Mandible
Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight
Up, Aloft in the Air
Margins
The Joker’s Greatest Triumph
To London and Rome
A Shower of Gold

UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES, UNNATURAL ACTS
The Indian Uprising
The Balloon
This Newspaper Here
Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning
Report
The Dolt
The Police Band
Edward and Pia
A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
Can We Talk
Game
Alice
A Picture History of the War
The President
See the Moon?

CITY LIFE
Views of My Father Weeping
Paraguay
The Falling Dog
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Policemen’s Ball
The Glass Mountain
The Explanation
Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel
The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend
Sentence
Bone Bubbles
On Angels
Brain Damage
City Life

SADNESS
Critique de la Vie Quotidienne
Träumerei
The Genius
Perpetua
A City of Churches
The Party
Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916
A Film
The Sandman
Departures
Subpoena
The Catechist
The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
The Rise of Capitalism
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Daumier

AMATEURS
Our Work and Why We Do It
The Wound
110 West Sixty-First Street
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
The School
The Great Hug
I Bought a Little City
The Agreement
The Sergeant
What to Do Next
The Captured Woman
And Then
Porcupines at the University
The Educational Experience
The Discovery
Rebecca
The Reference
The New Member
You Are as Brave as Vincent van Gogh
At the End of the Mechanical Age

GREAT DAYS
The Crisis
The Apology
The New Music
Cortés and Montezuma
The King of Jazz
The Question Party
Belief
Tales of the Swedish Army
The Abduction from the Seraglio
The Death of Edward Lear
Concerning the Bodyguard
The Zombies
Morning
On the Steps of the Conservatory
The Leap
Great Days

(from) SIXTY STORIES
Eugénie Grandet
Nothing: A Preliminary Account
A Manual for Sons
Aria
The Emerald
How I Write My Songs
The Farewell
The Emperor
Thailand
Heroes
Bishop
Grandmother’s House

OVERNIGHT TO MANY DISTANT CITIES
They called for more structure . . .
Visitors
Financially, the paper . . .
Affection
I put a name in an envelope . . .
Lightning
That guy in the back room . . .
Captain Blood
A woman seated on a plain wooden chair . . .
Conversations with Goethe
Well we all had our Willie & Wade records . . .
Henrietta and Alexandra
Speaking of the human body . . .
The Sea of Hesitation
When he came . . .
Terminus
The first thing the baby did wrong . . .
The Mothball Fleet
Now that I am older . . .
Wrack
On our street . . .
The Palace at Four a.m.
I am, at the moment . . .
Overnight to Many Distant Cities

(from) FORTY STORIES
Chablis
On the Deck
Opening
Sindbad
Rif
Jaws
Bluebeard
Construction
Letters to the Editore
January

UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Basil from Her Garden
Edwards, Amelia
A Man
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ISBN: 978-1-59853-684-3 1004 pages

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N° 343 Library of America Series

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