Donald Barthelme

The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself-even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead...

" ... Donald Barthelme's new collection ... takes us from New York to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Barcelona to Paris to the Radiant City of Le Corbusier, balancing twelve of his widely celebrated short stories against an equal number of brief visionary texts, new in his work, that provide a lovely, haunting counterpoint"--From dust jacket.

"This comprehensive gathering highlights Barthelme's unique approach to fiction: his upside-down worlds that are nonetheless grounded in fundamental human truths; his scrambled visions of history that yield unexpected insights; and his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, "the central principle of all art in the twentieth century"..."

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time --