The Great Short-Story Collection Purge, Part 1

Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme

I started my Great Short-Story Collection Purge (see yesterday's entry) with Barthelme, reading the first two stories, "Margins" and "A Shower of Gold." Unusual. Wacky. Funny. Twisted. I have a feeling that no two of these sixty stories are alike, but are all quirky, humorous snapshots of the culture. This from the back of the cover wrap:

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

And then some.

The Verdict = Keep it.