Presents a collection of sixty short stories by twentieth-century American author Donald Barthelme.

"In a dystopian future, an American couple flee their increasingly authoritarian country by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novel's structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons--a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories intersecting with memorable moments in human time: the Fukushima disaster;...

" ... 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.

Novel of the absurd, paraphrasing the familiar fairy tale. Modern setting.

Short stories, chiefly reprinted from the New Yorker.

"From the freezing alleys of Chicago to the dew-blanketed bayou of Florida. From bouncing drunks and cleaning up puke to biking through the swamp laughing at peacocks. Freeze to thaw. Filth and broken glass and black water backed up in showers; lizards and Girl Scouts and themed birthday parties. A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage...