Product Description
This study argues that the often-noted resistance to interpretation by these authors' experimental fiction has to do with the radical functioning of metaphor in their texts. After an introductory discussion about the contemporary debates about metaphor and narrative, each author's work is examined in various theoretical contexts such as cognitivist models, deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, concentrating on a number of narrative strategies which are grouped under the term piracy. The conclusion situates the metaphoric narrative in relation to the competing literary critical paradigms of postmodernist fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Donald Barthelme's Purity of Heart Revealed and Explained
For those of us who in the 60s and 70s hungrily scanned each new issue of the New Yorker, hoping to find a story by Donald Barthelme, this book is a satisfying evocation of an exciting time in American letters.

Faced with the question of whether to adapt himself to the universe or force it to adapt to him, Donald Barthelme chose the latter. Through the force of his personality (and while still in his very early twenties), Barthelme founded a literary and intellectual journal in Houston and attracted some of the world's finest writers and thinkers as contributors. He directed a museum of contemporary art and attracted some of the world's finest artists as exhibitors. Meanwhile, he pondered how to change the way we think about and tell stories about ourselves. In pursuit of this goal, he invented new narrative forms that caught the attention of readers and writers everywhere.

Helen Moore Barthelme was married to Donald for a number of tumultuous years and remained involved with him up to his tragic early death in 1989. Her book captures the literary and artistic worlds of Houston and New York in the 60s and 70s and 80s and helps us understand how, with talent, conviction, and unwavering commitment, an individual can transcend circumstances and leave a mark upon his time.

Agree with DC
I agree with the reviewer from DC.Sure, Don's work has some literary worth -- funny is what seems to be the most common accolade, as if he were Jay Leno -- and his biographer's compilation of photos and thoughts and memories may prove useful to those students of his early years.However, those who step back and analyze Helen's work from an unbiased perspective doessee something Gatsbyesque in Helen's illusions of Don, the Houston scene, and how poor Don turned out. Broke and unrecognized and suffering fools.I also agree that Helen has more talent than Don ever did; she just didn't have someone to nurture and encourage her like Don did.It may be a generational thing where the men were the writers and the women the inspiration.Yeah, I guess I have to admit, maybe it is a Scott and Zelda thing too.I like the DC review very much as it shows some skill with literature and language, and was thought provoking.I bought the book because of it, even though some didn't find it helpful.What's helpful? It sold one more copy.

She's no Katharine Graham
My personnal recommendations showed I would like Kay Graham's Personal History and this.Yes, I did enjoy Mrs. Graham's as she lived a life long after Phil rejected, , betrayed and left her (in his own way!!)But this one is really more about a woman that didn't let go, or build much of a life for herself except with members of his family and her own sisters and maybe a few Texas English profs who could remember him.I think it is sad.Maybe I will use it for my cockerspaniel.Ha.Seriously, I enjoy reading astute reviews and this is the first I've ever responded to because the reviewer seemed to have a college education and know about aliteration and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and see the irony in poor Donald's biography.It is good that his early life is memorialized, as some day someone may want to write a dissertation about him.It will come in handy, just as Nancy Milford found value in Zelda's early life.It's always good to record history.However, this is no Kay Graham book.Indeed, as lovely and loving a person as Helen is, she is no Caro -- but then Donald was no LBJ either.Anyway, its always fun to read the reviews.Some are quite intelligent, even astute and scholarly in tone, while others are justsophmoric lovefests.

An acutely observed memoir rich with pleasure and sadness
This is not just a happy gloss on Barthelme's early adulthood, it is an intricate, detailed rendering of a time and place--Houston in the late 50s and early 60s. It's a story full of touching romance, heartbreak, anger, sadness, and loss. The characters here seem real and troubled, and their lives are messy, complex, derailed as often as not. Is there a clue to Barthelme's genius here? Well, sure. He was witty and ambitious and very damn clever. Funny, he was funny. His life seems to have been not quite so charmed as his work. This is a vivid portrait, complete with parts of Barthelme's life that may not have been so savory, and it humanizes this man whose work is always at pains to present only the carefully polished surface. An excellent introduction to the artist, his milieu, and his work. Ms. Moore-Barthelme writes with assurance and grace, and is always generous and forthright.

It's a little more complicated than that
No, no no, no.Donald Barthelme's brilliant stories and novels are generous, funny, and wise, and this sparkling literary biography shows commensurate qualities.I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, scholar or general reader, as a report by a subtle and complex observer of a subtle and complex man in a crucial early period of his life as a writer.One hopes meanwhile thatour daughters [and our sons, and our cocker spaniels] have the sense to ignore vitriolic reviews aglow with artistical alliteration and unfounded "facts," misrepresenting Ms. Barthelme's book and issuing out of some long-nourished hurt.
This is a very good book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wonderful
Almost everything Donald Barthelme wrote is worth reading, though almost none of it is easy reading. This collection of stories is no exception to either.

Great Fun
A wonderful collection of classic stories my a master of surrealist short fiction. These pieces are thirty years old now but they're still hip and fresh and very funny. Barthelme is Wodehouse on acid. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Barthelme helped wire our multimedia.
Too bad "Guilty Pleasures" is outta print. No one could take our multimedia to its logical (well, illogical...) extreme like Barthelme. The parodies abound: "The Teaching of Don B." is an incisive if nowoutdated parody of the Carlos Castaneda novels. My favorite is "TheCase of Bitsy S." A brief but utterly wicked parody of so-calledscientific research articles!: if only real research papers were thisshort! "Snap! Snap!" is simply a litany of quotes from magazines,interspersed with some kind of motivational tirade. Very strange! Showslike Ally McBeal & Malcolm in the Middle exhibit the influence ofBarthelme--interior monologue & fantasy; whether this is direct or not,I sure don't know. Apparently, some of this stuff has been published inother volumes, but you'd have to check the copyright permissions to seewhether they're from "Guilty Pleasures." ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

DB groupies will need to read the interviews
I bought the first edition, but it took ten years to dive in. The two opening essays, After Joyce, and then 20 years later, Not-Knowing, flash DB's searching and intense intelligence. They also reveal the shift in his understanding of fiction, from a very Beckettian take that each story or novel exists as an object in the world, to the later, more experienced sense that a fundamental aspect of the writer is the practice of exploring the world of sentences about characters, without knowing what will come next. The essays are mostly minor: advertising reviews from the early 1960s (more significant when one realizes that his wife at the time, Helen Moore Barthelme, was in advertising), thoughtful pamphlets about specific art shows in the 1980s, and the pieces that were once published in the New Yorker as Talk of the Town. The interviews at the end are extremely rewarding, esp the very long KPFA trialog, where DB shows his sparkling humor, as well as revealing at moments a glint from the steely anger that underlies his sharp discriminating sensibilities. ... Read more

Product Description
A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. A game of baseball as played by T.S. Eliot and Wilem "Big Ball" de Kooning.A recipe suitable for feeding sixty park-enamored celebrants at one's daughter's wedding. An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who, until his death in 1989, more or less goosed American letters into taking a quantum leap. Now sixty-three of Barthelme's rare or previously uncollected shorter works--including satires and fables, plays for stage and radio, and collages--have been assembled in a single volume. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the power to blast any reader into an altered state of consciousness.

"Barthelme happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.'"--Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Is Barthelme part of the history of postmodernism, or is he someone to read now?
The consensus on Barthelme is that he launched the postmodern short-story form in the US. A very thoughtful review by James Wolcott ("Booforum," February / March 2008, pp. 9-10), sums it up very well:

"Today, I would hazard... the track marks of Barthelme's suave, subversive cunning are to be found less in postmod fiction -- although David Foster Wallace's dense foliage of footnotes suggests a Bathelmean undergrowth and George Saunders's arcade surrealism has a runaway-nephew quality -- than in the conscientiously oddball, studiedly offhand, hiply recherché, mock-anachronistic formalism of 'McSweeney's,' 'The Believer,' 'The Crier,' and related organs of articulate mumblecore."

I would add three things:

1. The current generation of young MFA writing program candidates see the 'McSweeney's' option as one of their main goals. So in that sense, Barthelme is a ubiquitous influence.

2. Dave Hickey, the art critic, is a spiritual child of Barthelme's; and Hickey's kind of art criticism is increasingly influential. (I go into this in my pamphlet, "What Happened to Art Criticism?")

3. George Saunders's essay on Barthelme, in "The Brain-Dead Megaphone," is the best thing written on Barthelme, if you're looking for a guide.

So it's indisputable that Barthelme is part of the history of postwar American writing. But is he someone to read now? Reading this collection, I was struck by just how much of it has lost its shine. There are hilarious pieces, and sometimes the wit is as sharp as it seemed in the 1970s. But Barthelme's liberal politics are really very predictable -- as easily predictable as his quips are surprising. And his absurdism has always been a safe version of real absurdism. If you're interested in surrealist or absurdist shock, read Raymond Roussel, or Daniil Kharms (who has been praised by George Saunders, in the "New York Times Book Review.") As Wolcott points out, the entire New Fiction movement was subjected to a typically devastating critique by Gore Vidal ("American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction") in 1976; Vidal thought the movement, including Pynchon, was contrived and derivative of french experimental fiction. I'd rather trace it to Russian and central European absurdist literature and surrealism, but the significance is the same: Barthelme is watered-down, domesticated, playful, harmless absurdism. Never too angry, seldom directly polemic, never despairing. (That would be gauche, of course.) After a few days reading Barthelme, the happiness of seeing plodding seriousness exploded continuously and brilliantly right in my face when I least expected it but really not-so-secretly expected it all along pales, and I begin to wish for some real pain, and laughter that doesn't come with a little grimace of acknowledged artifice or complicity, or an unnatural heave.

Playing the B-sides
The critical consensus on Donald Barthelme is that he basically reinvented the short story during his lifetime (he died in 1989).While there is some exaggeration involved in this assessment -- at times, Barthelme seems to be doing nothing much more than channeling Kafka -- his work is unique, inventive, and experimental in the best sense of the word.The present collection contains many of his occasional and "lighter" works.A number of them, for example, originally appeared as unsigned pieces in "The New Yorker".If the collections "Sixty Stories" and "Forty Stories" can be seen as Barthelme's greatest hits, then "The Teachings of Don B." can be seen as the B-sides.The subtitle of the book calls this a collection of "satires, parodies, fables, illustrated stories, and plays," and the description fits.The title story is a send-up of Carlos Castenada's "Don Juan" books, and on the whole the volume is marked by a certain air of lightness and good humor.There is a stretch in the middle, consisting mainly of works that originally appeared between chapters in the book "Overnight to Many Distant Cities", that is somewhat slower and more ponderous than the surrounding text, but it doesn't last for long.Of particular interest are the illustrated stories, where the text is complimented by collages made from old photographs and illustrations, somewhat in the manner of the Surrealists.My only complaint about this book is the inclusion of three short plays at the end.While interesting, they don't quite mesh with the rest of the volume, and could easily have been published on their own.The collection also features an introduction by Thomas Pynchon, which in itself it worth the price of admission.

Funny, sad, inoculating, irritating
With the possible exception of Thomas Pynchon, there isn't a writer around, living or dead (that I know of--I haven't read them all), who gives us a funnier, more accurate understanding of the absurdity of latetwentieth-century existence than Barthelme, and it's good to have thesepreviously uncollected pieces in one volume.The quality of this book is,I believe, remarkably even, but some pieces hit me harder than others.Noone could have written "Here's the Ed Sullivan Show" but DB; whatan eye the guy had!

Read this book (or SIXTY STORIES or SNOW WHITE) andyou will not be able to look at the world in the same way again.DB knewbetter than most what petty, unexamined, selfish lives we live (but this isnot to say that DB was mean spirited).Does he give solutions?Sort of,but not solutions that I am capable of paraphrasing.There may be readersfor whom DB's teachings will seem pointless and not worth the trouble.(Tothem I say, "Back to your Grisham and Steele!")But for most ofthe rest of us--as bombarded as we are with insulting campaign pitches,thisandthat.com (!) ads, news of how the market is making us all wealthy,endless blockbuster film versions of mediocre TV shows, more tripe aboutwhat a great president Reagan was and on and on--DB can function as a sortof philosophical ophtalmologist with a rare antidote that will both make uslaugh at and feel a bit grim about our consumer society.

Incredibly funny
I have never read anything this hilarious.It's perfectly balanced, too: Barthelme never goes too far or too short.Also get the "40 Stories" which in my opinion are much better than the 60.

Oh yes...
Just about perfect ... Read more