The Balloon is now my very favorite short story of all time.It's only simple on the surface.My second favorite story in the book is Can We Talk.Best narrative use of artichokes ever.There is so much to love in this collection of stories. The author uses common colors as adjectives so skillfully that they lend substance to the story, making it almost tangible. This use of colors may sound obvious, but I've very rarely read a book where this was done so well.When asked how i decided to purchase a

In the midst of so much dysfunction, function is interesting.I am, as I say, not entirely sympathetic. Certain things about the new President are not clear. I can’t make out what he is thinking. When he has finished speaking I can never remember what he has said. There remains only an impression of strangeness, darkness...A great collection. As seems to be normally the case with Barthelme, some of the stories are too cryptic/over my head for my liking but when they work, they work admiringly. Th...

Quintessential Barthelme, this is his second collection of short fictions, which includes the classic "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning". That story appeared in the April 1968 issue (#3) of the New American Review, only a couple of months before Kennedy's assassination. I happened on a used copy of NAR #3 about a year later, and this little "story" of Barthelme's simply blew me away. I hadn't yet become acquainted with other experimentalists of the time, so "Robert Kennedy" was like nothing el...

Early short stories by Barthelme about different subjects including the Vietnam War, contemporary art, politics, love and fatherhood. Included is the frequently anthologized “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning,” a great pastiche of the “profile” articles that appear in glossy magazines like Life and Time. In some of the fictions, the narrative techniques are experimental (“A Picture History of the War,” “Edward and Pia,” “Alice); in others, while the narrative techniques are more conventional, t...

(Not quite a review; more of a diatribe against the modern conception of a great story).I had read "The Balloon" years before. The story is remarkably deep despite its sparse style and lack of any standard ideas of how to write a "good" story. I find it hard to read these stories and not come to the conclusion that Barthelme, one of the great story writers in American history, would never get published today. Just think of those gigantic slush piles. A reader would get through a few paragraphs a...

This early Barthelme collection contains the incomparable "Game", the story that first introduced me to Barthelme's wild and wonderful works. The story is just as impressive in print as it is read by David Strathairn, the way I first encountered it via a "Selected Shorts" podcast. "Game" is simultaneously an immaculate character portrait, a wordy delight, a brilliant comedy, and a haunting exploration of not just man's devastating powers but also his true fallibility. In my mind this story blows...

From "This Newspaper Here": "Again today the little girl come along come along dancing doggedly with her knitting needle steel-blue knitting needle. She knows I can't get up out of this chair theoretically and sticks me, here and there, just to make me yell, nice little girl from down the block somewhere. Once I corrected her sharply saying 'don't for God's sake what pleasure is there hearing me scream like this?' She was wearing a blue Death of Beethoven printed dress and white shoes which mama...

A string of memorable postmodern, metafictional quick reads straight from the outrageous imagination of Donald Barthelme. Many of these tales I love, but none more than The Balloon, a story with such special beauty it clearly deserves its own write-up. Here goes: Postmodern: Lyrical and light, as light as a very large feather this Barthelme’s short-short begins with a narrator telling us he engineered a balloon expanding twenty city blocks north to south over buildings, from Fourteenth Street al...

Donald Barthelme turns on some weird ultraviolet light and in this light our everyday life at once turns into Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts…There really is a generation gap. The younger is the young generation and the older is the old one the wider is the gap: “The little girl jabbed again hitting the thin thigh that time and said ‘we know exactly how little it is and even that is money down the drain why don't you die damn you dirty old man what are you contributing?’ Then I explained a...

I love Donald Barthelme. His writing has a big influence on mine. His story "The Balloon" is remarkable and shows why writing is fun and gorgeous and inspiring.

I loved this book. It really turned my head around, or, as we said back in the old days, blew my mind.

The Balloon is fine. Everyone loves to love it and cite how oh so very important it is in the world of Pomo short story writing. I get it to a certain extent. But I also understand why his writing has become less of a lure to the young writer. It feels so intentionally weird and flip and without much concrete emotive reality. I guess that's part of the point. The choppy plotless style lends itself to feeling really precocious but not very powerful to the contemporary reader. I'm glad I read it,

"I considered in an editorial the idea that the world is an error on the part of God, one of the earliest and finest heresies, they hated that. Ringle from the telephone, 'what do you mean the world is a ROAR on the part of God,' which pleased me."I editorialized that Bartheleme was an error in a world of author-Gods, here, see. They will hate him. The telephone shingled: what do you mean Barthelme roared, wasn't he a flea?

Donald Barthelme Saved From DrowningBlargle McGargle & the Infinite WhininessAs Frank Black tells us at the start of "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (everyone sing along now: "THIS MONKEY'S GAAAAHN TO HEAV-UN!") "there was a guy." This guy accused Rick Moody of being the worst writer of his generation. I don't remember his name, and even though I'll have to look the guy's article up to get the quote I'll need in a second, I'm still calling him Blargle McGargle and nothing you can do will change that. No...

In the final story we find the following sentence : “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” This was jumped upon rabidly by many commentators on Donald Barthelme’s spaced-out, intellectual, reserved, lunatic cut-up short story capers. Ah ha! Here is the key! So much so that in a written interview in 1972 DB issued the following response:“WRITER CONFESSES THAT HE NO LONGER TRUSTS FRAGMENTS”“Trust ‘Misplaced’,” Author Declares“Will Seek ‘Wholes’ in Future” He SaysNEW YORK, June 24 (A & P) – Donald...

What’s there to say about Barthelme that hasn’t already been said?I don’t know, lots of stuff. Or maybe no stuff. I’m going to take my amateur thoughts for a walk here.For moi, DB is the most perfect writer of the last generation and to this day nobody has breathed on the neck of his Srange Syle. I toil in this field myself. For DB being the trailblazer he was, I’ve hiked some of those hikes and let me tell ya, they are tremulous and lead to some desolate places (and I always get lost on the way...

"I wrote poppycock, sometimes cockypap," says the narrator of "See the Moon?" And that explains a lot. But the cockypap is great, though if you don't like it, don't bother. I loved the story "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning," which is made up of sections whose subjects are ways of looking at Kennedy. In the section called, "Attitude towards his work," the narrator says, "Sometimes I can't seem to do anything. The work is there, piled up, it seems to me an insurmountable obstacle....Then, in a...

I dunno, man. Barthelme is one of those writers I should love, in theory. In this collection I did love "The Balloon" and thought a few other stories were interesting or funny—"Report," "The Police Band," and "Game." But the others...I don't know. Too inscrutable for me. I've read a few other scattered Barthelme stories and really liked them, so this won't be the last collection of his that I read. But half of these stories were uphill battles, and kind of not worth the struggle. Everyone should...

This book tumbles the words out of it. A strange prose style makes it sometimes a little difficult to follow the image projection. This writer is phenomenal at cutting close; flawed contradictions sung with unflailing emotive power. Another, on the other hand, might view the stories as being almost unnecessary for the telling. Neither mawkish or sentimental, of almost crude powerful construction. It is a little book of unanticipated rewards that follow on and onwards.

The story, "The Balloon" was a life changer for me when I first read it. Even more than I suspect Barthelme realized, it points the way toward a postmodern culture. Anyone on Goodreads or Facebook should be able to see the connection between the balloon and social networking. The rest of the collection is more experimentally postmodern, not that there's anything wrong with that. It just didn't do it for me as much.