Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Barthelme, Donald (Vol. 23) - Samuel Coale

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SAMUEL COALE

In a recent interview in The New York Times, Donald Barthelme said of his art: "I grew up with disjunction … the world was turning upside down … Most of our reality is imposed on us." The stories [in Sixty Stories] reflect all of this: the disconnection between conversations and sentences, the sense of helplessness of many of his flat-voiced characters, the spare cool quality of abstract art….

Here are tales of good zombies…. And a balloon that covered New York City. People slid and rode on the surfaces of that balloon as one can do on the surfaces of these bizarre stories. "Fragments are the only forms I trust," Barthelme has said, and we believe him. The stories appear as scraps, doodles, snatches, bits and pieces of conversations, intimations of rituals and apocalyptic situations. "It is wrong so speak of 'situations,' implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." A void inhabits the...

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1. Introduction
2. Maclin Bocock
3. Jerome Klinkowitz
4. Carey Horwitz
5. John Romano
6. Charles Newman
7. Samuel Coale
8. Lois Gordon
9. Copyright