Barthelme, Donald
Barthelme, Donald( 1931–89),author of stories collected in Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1984), all possessed of a fantastic humor marked by a straightforward presentation of absurdly grotesque, illogical, and meaningless matters as if to indicate that their world, and therefore our own, is wholly irrational. The same attitudes and parodic style mark his novels, Snow White (1967), an oblique, incongruous version of the fairy tale in episodic form, and The Dead Father (1975), telling of 19 children hauling their father, both a living man and a gigantic carcass, across a city to his death. Paradise (1986) is a fantasy as a novel, considered somewhat lesser. Forty Stories (1987)...
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