3 Review(s)

With these sixty audacious and blackly witty stories, Donald Barthelme depicts a rich miscellany of the absurdities of life. Surreal events abound – a thirty-five year old man finds himself back in sixth grade due to a baffling error; King Kong, now an adjunct professor of art history, climbs through a window to join a drinks party; the new owner of a little city becomes overwhelmed by the demands its citizens make on their proprietor; and the nonsense poet Edward Lear cheerfully invites his acquaintances to his bedside to witness his death. Constantly inventive and unsettling, Barthelme’s stories create a dazzling world of language and thought, perception and memory, myths and dreams.