The Teachings of Don B.
Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays
Fiction & Literature, Humorous, Short Stories
| Author: | Donald Barthelme, Kim Herzinger | ISBN: | 9781640090569 |
| Publisher: | Counterpoint Press | Publication: | April 1, 2018 |
| Imprint: | Counterpoint | Language: | English |
| Author: | Donald Barthelme, Kim Herzinger |
| ISBN: | 9781640090569 |
| Publisher: | Counterpoint Press |
| Publication: | April 1, 2018 |
| Imprint: | Counterpoint |
| Language: | English |
A wildly inventive and deeply humorous collection of literary delights by one of the great contemporary masters of the short story.
A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed.
A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem Big Bull de Kooning.
A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter’s wedding.
An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God.
Acclaimed as “a small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language” (The New York Times Book Review), these astonishingly brilliant literary fragments could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who until his death in 1989 seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. 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. As Thomas Pynchon intones in his admiring Introduction, “Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make 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.’”
“Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme’s ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it.” —Los Angeles Times
“Donald Barthelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Hemingway and O’Hara did in theirs.” —New York Times
“Every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways.” —Dave Eggers
“One of the great citizens of contemporary world letters.” —Robert Coover
A wildly inventive and deeply humorous collection of literary delights by one of the great contemporary masters of the short story.
A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed.
A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem Big Bull de Kooning.
A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter’s wedding.
An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God.
Acclaimed as “a small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language” (The New York Times Book Review), these astonishingly brilliant literary fragments could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who until his death in 1989 seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. 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. As Thomas Pynchon intones in his admiring Introduction, “Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make 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.’”
“Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme’s ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it.” —Los Angeles Times
“Donald Barthelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Hemingway and O’Hara did in theirs.” —New York Times
“Every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways.” —Dave Eggers
“One of the great citizens of contemporary world letters.” —Robert Coover
