Books by Donald Antrim
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013: Including stories by Donald Antrim, Andrea Barrett, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Kelly Link, ... and Lily Tuck (The O. Henry Prize Collection)
by Laura Furman, Donald Antrim
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories take place in such far-flung locales as a gorgeous sailboat in Hong Kong, a Cuban sugar plantation, the Kenai River in Alaska, a mansion in New Delhi, a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat, and the ghost-haunted rubble of a Turkish girls’ school. Also included are the editor’s introduction, essays from the jurors (Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, and Jim Shepard) on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.
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The Afterlife: A Memoir
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.
The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.
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The Verificationist: A Novel
With a New Introduction by George Saunders
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
It is early spring, and Tom has called together his fellow psychologists at the Krakower Institute for their biannual pancake supper―a chance for likeminded analysts to talk shop and casually unburden themselves over flapjacks. But, as Tom knows (at least subconsciously), his brainy colleagues are a little on edge―simmering with romantic tension and professional grievance, their stew of conflicting ego and id just might boil to the surface before the pretty waitress brings their next coffee refill. When Tom tries to provoke a food fight, a rival colleague locks him in a therapeutic hold, triggering a transcendent if totally bizarre transformation that will free Tom to confront his greatest pleasures and fears.
Darkly funny and beautifully written, The Verificationist confirms Donald Antrim as one of America's best and most original authors.
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Louis-philippe-joseph Égalité: Scènes Contemporaines, Volume 1... (French Edition)
"A dark, suburban fantasy . . . richly funny, even whimsical, and bizarrely familiar." ―The NewYorker
In the seaside community of Donald Antrim's Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the citizens are restless. The mayor has fired stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, and his public execution was a messy affair. As these hawkish suburbanites fortify their houses with deadly moats and land mines, a former third-grade teacher named Pete Robinson steps forward with a tenuous bid to replace the mayor. But can anyone satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim's story of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.
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The Hundred Brothers: A Novel
With a New Introduction by Jonathan Franzen
There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Noah; Nick, Dennis, Bertram, Russell, and Virgil. The doctor, the documentary filmmaker, and the sculptor in burning steal; the eldest, the youngest, and the celebrated "perfect" brother, Benedict. In Donald Antrim's mordantly funny novel The Hundred Brothers, our narrator and his colossal fraternity of ninety-eight brothers (one couldn't make it) have assembled in the crumbling library of their family's estate for a little sinister fun. Executed with the invention and intelligence of Barthelme and Pynchon, Antrim's taxonomy of male specimens is in equal proportions disturbing and absurdly hilarious.
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The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories
Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do―bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo―they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." And here is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.
Copies
No copies available.
The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories
A masterful story collection-heartbreaking and hilarious-from one of America's greatest writers
Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim's stories. As they do the things we all do-bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo-they're confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America's most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as "one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years." The Emerald Light in the Air is Antrim's best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.
Copies
No copies available.
The Dead Father (FSG Classics)
by Donald Barthelme, Donald Antrim
The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
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One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival
One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021
One of BuzzFeed's Best Books of 2021
One of Vulture's Best Books of 2021
Named one of the Most Anticipated of Books of 2021 by the Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and The Millions
A searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness.
As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalizations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT―and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it―as well as years of fitful recovery and setback.
Through a clear and haunting reckoning with the author’s own story, One Friday in April confronts the limits of our understanding of suicide. Donald Antrim’s personal insights reframe suicide―whether in thought or in action―as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person.
A necessary companion to William Styron’s classic? Darkness Visible, this profound, insightful work sheds light on the tragedy and mystery of suicide, offering solace that may save lives.
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