60 Stories (Penguin Classics LiteratureSeries)

the pleasure of the text.

Postmodern/avant-garde/experimental authors tend to range from excellent to unreadable. Barthelme is one of the figures (along with Pynchon, Wallace, and Gaddis) that gives this new breed of weird, challenging fiction a good name. He was peers with John Barth. Interesting story: one time, an interviewer asked Barthelme his advice for fiction writers. He said they should read every philosophy book from Plato to the present. Another reviewer posed the same question to John Barth, repeated what Barthelme said, and Barth answered, "read every piece of fiction from Gilgamesh to the present." Reading his fiction, you can tell the guy read everything. Many of his stories parody writing itself, with stories written as spoofs of travel brochures and encyclopedia listings. I like this collection the most out of all of his work.

Mostly incoherent

I fail to understand the high praise Barthelme gets; most of these stories are incoherent and pointless to me, and I do not foresee a desire to read them again at any time later in my life. If you expect that a `story' tells a story, you will be disappointed. Most of the texts in these `60 Stories' would not suffer if you rearranged the paragraphs, or left out some (even many) sentences. Of course, this leaves much room for interpretation and hermeneutics, so it is perhaps understandable if these texts are found useful in literature classes. The back cover blurb cites a New York Times review which states "Sixty Stories is a Whole Earth Catalogue of life in our time", so perhaps this book is more interesting for those readers who like to browse a list of catalogue items.

Will you Tell me?

Will you tell me why this book was published?

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.