Books by Frederick Barthelme
Elroy Nights
A successful artist and professor caught in a midlife crisis, Elroy Nights--with his wife's agreement--elects to live separately from her, embarking on a journey of discovery with his young students, until a tragedy forces him to deal with a world suddenly gone wrong.
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Elroy Nights
A generous and intimate novel from American literature's premier chronicler of middle-class angst in the new South.
In Elroy Nights, Frederick Barthelme does a fresh turn on territory he's made his own over the last two decades: a middle-class America studded with characters maybe a little more wised-up than not--cautious, skeptical, private folks who would rather joke about their problems than complain about them.
Elroy Nights is a reasonably successful artist and professor, fifty-something, who is caught between the midlife crisis of his forties and the much anticipated sublime decay of his sixties. Elroy and his wife Clare, perhaps too comfortable with each other, elect to try living separately, a choice characteristic of their relationship--fond and thoughtful, responsive, generous to a fault. So Elroy moves out, leases a condo, begins hanging out with his twenty-something students, and experiences a splendid reenchantment with the world. But when an unforeseen tragedy throws his, and everyone's, foibles and failures into high relief, he's confronted with reordering, retracking--and reimagining--a world gone suddenly haywire.
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Waveland (Vintage Contemporaries)
Set amidst the tatters of post-Katrina Gulf Coast Mississippi, Waveland is a brilliantly observed portrait of our times from one of the most incisive novelists at work today.
Partially retired architect Vaughn Williams does what he can to remain "viable." Battling the doldrums of midlife, he teaches an occasional class, reads the newspapers, scours the Internet, and thinks obsessively about his late father. When his ex-wife seeks refuge from her hotheaded boyfriend, Vaughn and his girlfriend, Greta, agree to let her move in, perhaps a little too cavalierly. Add in Vaughan’s annoyingly successful younger brother, who carries a torch for Vaughn’s ex-wife, and lingering suspicions about Greta’s involvement in her husband’s murder and the result is an emotionally resonant tale of mortality, love, regret, and redemption that only Barthelme could unwind.
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$17.00
Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss
by Frederick Barthelme, Steven Barthelme
Double Down is a true story, a terrifying roller-coaster ride deep into the heart of two men, and into the world of floating Gulf Coast casinos. When both of their parents died within a short time of each other, the writers Frederick and Steven Barthelme, both professors of English in Mississippi, inherited a goodly sum of money. What followed was a binge during which they gambled away their entire fortune-and more. And then, in a cruel twist of fate, they were charged with cheating at the tables.
Told with a mixture of sadness and wry humor, and with a compelling look at the physical aura of gambling-the feel of the cards, the smell of the crowd, the sounds of the tables-Double Down is a reflection on the lure of challenging the odds, the attraction of stepping into the void. A cautionary tale (the brothers were eventually exonerated), it is a book that, once read, will never be forgotten.
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There Must Be Some Mistake: A Novel
A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." (The New Yorker).
Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair.
He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense.
Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.
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No copies available.
Waveland
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi's Gulf Coast, mostly retired architect Vaughn Williams, who is beset by the routine but no less troubling difficulties of late midlife, is doing what he can to remain, as he says, “viable.” He scans the channels, reads newspapers and blogs online, Googles practically everything, teaches an occasional class at the local junior college, and worries perhaps overmuch about his late father.
When his ex-wife, Gail, is assaulted by her hot-tempered new boyfriend, she asks him and his landlady/girlfriend, Greta, to move in with her. Perhaps a little too cavalierly, they agree, and complications distinctly Barthelme-esque follow, including manly confrontations with the perp, lamentations of his father’s life and death, casual moonlight drives, gambling for money, adults playing with trains, and the eventual untimely arrival of Vaughn’s annoyingly successful younger brother, followed closely by Vaughn’s ex-wife’s invitation to remarry.
The tattered landscape of the post-hurricane Gulf Coast is the perfect analogue for these catastrophically out-of-order lives, and in this setting the players work into and out of almost all their troubles. In the process, and en route to a satisfying set of resolutions, Barthelme’s acute eye and subtle wit uncover and autopsy an inner landscape of mortality, love, regret, and redemption. The result is his most emotionally resonant work of fiction yet—and a new reason to celebrate him as an American master.
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Moon Deluxe
Frederick Barthelme's wry and wonderful stories have given us a stunning, cautionary, funny, sometimes bleak, and often transcendent portrait of contemporary life in the sprawl of suburban America. Barthelme made his remarkable debut with these tender and affectionate stories, most of which were originally published in The New Yorker. Moon Deluxe received the high praise of such writers as John Barth, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Margaret Atwood, and earned Barthelme a permanent place in the pantheon of contemporary American writers. In these stories he delicately probes the peculiar corners of contemporary culture, capturing the fast and often touching ways we relate to each other and to the time in which we live.
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$12.00
The Brothers
After Del Tribute almost sleeps with his brother's sexually edgy wife, The Brothers sets out to trace and detail the intricate pattern of consequences of this near indiscretion. Del and Bud, two brothers whose middle-aged adolescent antics have a way of messing up each other's lives, both confront the bittersweet comfort of having too many choices. In a remarkable performance that extends the territory of Barthelme's fiction, the love and desire of these brothers is laid open, explored, and experienced.
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Tracer
Weaves a tale of tangled loves and desires in the story of a newly divorced man named Martin who decides to spend a weekend with his ex-sister-in-law Dominica, and promptly becomes her lover.
Martin, in the middle of a divorce, is seeking solace. Flying off to the neon-lit south Florida coastline, he settles in for some rest and rehabilitation with his soon-to-be ex-sister-in-law. Martin quickly settles into her bed too, creating a situation that is bound for trouble--especially when his ex-wife also appears on the scene. Cautiously, the threesome try to sort things out, engaging in varied rituals of mating, hating, forgetting, and forgiving. A funny and unforgettable novel about friends, family, and the kind of quirky, complicated relationships that will keep readers rapt through the final pages.
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Natural Selection: A Novel
Peter Wexler is 40 and obsessed with what's wrong in the world, including his marriage. Deciding that a change of scenery might help, Peter leaves his wife and their son in search of a resolution to the confusion, estrangement, fatigue, and adultery that have confounded his life.
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The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories
Twenty years ago Frederick Barthelme began publishing stories that turned readers' expectations on their heads. In The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and elsewhere he published story after story that confounded the prevailing literary assumptions, treating our very ordinary lives with a new kind of careful and loving attention and imagination. He wrote intimate, funny, odd, detailed, laugh-out-loud stories about relationships that almost happen and ones that almost don't, about the ways we look at each other when we mean things we cannot bring ourselves to say.
Before there were slackers, or kids in parking lots, or stories that took the mundane seriously, there were these prescient stories by Frederick Barthelme. He took a post-ironic stance before the post-ironic had a name. He took fiction where few were then willing to go, took as his subject small romances, private fears, suburban estrangement, office angst, cultural isolation, apparently insignificant humiliations, and the growing information surplus (CNN is a sociological novel, he once remarked). He wrote--and continues to write--with a laser-surgery precision that stuns and delights both readers and critics. If he arrived at the new-literature party a little earlier than the other guests, he has not left early, and is thus well represented in The Law of Averages, with old and new stories side by side, ready to give up their abundant pleasures.
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Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
“Shields writes with an almost painfully attuned ear for the nuances of language and the way they attach to feelings and probe the most delicate layers of human consciousness. . . . She reminds us again why literature matters.” — New York Times Book Review
With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood
With the profound maturity and exquisite eye for detail that never failed to capture readers of her critically acclaimed novels, Carol Shields, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries, dazzles with these remarkable stories. Generous, delightful, and acutely observed, this essential collection illuminates the miracles that grace our lives; it will continue to enchant for years to come.
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Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers. For more than sixty years he has stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Now collected for the first time in one volume and chosen by the author himself are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," "Leaving the Yellow House," and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence." With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. This is a volume to treasure for longtime Bellow fans, and an excellent introduction for new readers.
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No copies available.
Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections―Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses―alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories
Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek.
Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas’s magisterial stories all in one volume, available in a beautiful new paperback edition.
This gathering of all Dylan Thomas’s stories―ranging chronologically from the dark, almost surrealistic tales of Thomas’s youth to such gloriously rumbustious celebrations of life as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and “Adventures in the Skin Trade”―charts the progress of “The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive” toward his mastery of the comic idiom. Here, too, are stories originally written for radio and television and, in a short appendix, the schoolboy pieces first published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine. A high point of the collection is Thomas’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,” a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.
Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety–somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, and irrepressible comedian of smalltown Wales.
Copies
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$24.95
Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections―Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses―alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories
Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek.
Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.
Copies
No copies available.
Collected Stories
by Frederick Barthelme, Carol Shields, Saul Bellow, Shirley Hazzard, Dylan Thomas
None
Copies
-
$27.99
There Must Be Some Mistake
A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." (The New Yorker).
Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair.
He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense.
Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.
Copies
No copies available.