Barthelme, Donald (Vol. 2) - Barthelme, Donald 1931–
Barthelme, Donald 1931–
Barthelme is an American experimental short story writer and novelist, author of Snow White and City Life. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 21-22.)
Donald Barthelme is [a] comedian who seems to have turned thinker. His first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, is an engaging collection of casual comic experiments, strictly from college humor often, none of them coming off with a bang but each carrying at least a small jolt. There are a few absurdist exercises, aleatory fiction, analogous to John Cage's music for twelve radios and twelve operators, like reading in rapid succession paragraph one on page two of every third novel on a single shelf in the library….
Snow White promotes … self-indulgence into an almost seamless morbidity. Mr. Barthelme, having decided to exploit his megrims, has written a remarkably slick pseudo-avantgarde novel, maybe the most cunningly modish book of...
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