Sixty Stories

By: Donald Barthelme

Narrated by: Dennis Holland

Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts.

Like all of Barthelme's work, the 60 stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Donald Barthelme's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Tracy Daugherty about the life and work of Donald Barthelme – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

©1983 Donald Barthelme (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Donald Barthelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Hemingway and O'Hara did in theirs. Sixty Stories is a whole earth catalog of life in our time." (The New York Times)

"Barthelme can focus our feeling into a bright point that can raise a blister. These 60 stories show him inventing at full pitch." (The Washington Post)

Fabulous

These stories are so genuinely funny and entertaining I cannot stop listening to them
over and over. I love all sixty of them.

Silliness

These absurd stories can only be taken in small doses. The language sparkles, but the stories are about little, if anything.

Read this collection instead

Any additional comments?

If this is what reading fiction sounded like in my head, I would burn all of the books. Even your books, just to be safe.
The narrator is a maniac with accents. Female characters sound like a man who has just been kicked in the balls, kids sound like a man who has been kicked in the balls a second time. Caricatures of French, German, Spanish, Southern, Irish etc, etc. Sometimes a character has an obnoxious accent for no reason at all.

Mr. Holland also alerts the listener to anything that might have a subtle humor, by using exaggeration and emphasis. I half expected him to ask me "did you get that? Eh? Eh? wink* wink*...it's funny, Wait I'll read it again..." Listening to these stories made me cringe, like when you see a man getting kicked in the balls, and I enjoy reading this writer's work.

Mr. Holland does have moments when he recedes, and gives the listener some personal space. "The Game" is read well
.
Just let the accents go, man. You don't need that crutch! You can do better than that! You ARE better than that.
I believe in you.