Jim Shorkey

Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories is one of the books that populates the many piles of books lying around my house waiting to be read.  A new biography (by Tracy Daugherty) has just been released about him. Last week his biography was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and there was also a longish piece in the New Yorker a couple of weeks back. They sparked enough interest for me to rebuild the piles of books to make Sixty Stories the top of the pile. Barthelme (who died in 1989), has been called  a post modernist, and absurdist and also challenging. I’m only three stories in and the challenging description is the one that’s sticking.  He was given a lot of latitude at the New Yorker where editor William Shawn thought “his work should be read like poetry rather than fiction”. Probably a good approach. I just woke up from a nap after drifting to sleep while reading “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”. I think the pattern of non-sequiturs triggered something in my brain. The dreams I just had were very trippy indeed. They were also very “challenging” to follow. 

Donald Barthelme - Sixty Stories

Denis Johnson writes about losers.  Their stories are grim, their luck always bad.  Yet reading his stories always seems uplifting.  The writing is so funny that you don’t get depressed by the circumstances of the characters. The dialogue is always original, and is so unexpected that each quote seems that it couldn’t have been imagined. It must be real. I’ve read a few of his books but not enough to know that many of the characters from last year’s Tree Of Smoke were culled from his other works. It was an essay in the Virginia Quarterly that alerted me to this fact. I found out that two of my favourite characters came from his debut novel, Angels. The characters weren’t really a part of the bigger story in Tree Of Smoke, but after reading Angels, I can see why Johnson wanted to ad to there story.

Denis Johnson - Angels