Praise for Flying to America
“It is possible . . . to trace [in Flying to America] the author’s development from an early postmodern baroque . . . to the fragmentary, almost minimalist style of his late–’60s and early–’70s prime.” —Los Angeles Times
“Flying to America’s Barthelmanian treasures: three previously unpublished stories, one of which he was working on at his death; his first published story (1959); the winning entry of a contest in which the author asked readers to finish a story of which he’d written the first three paragraphs; and a bunch of masterful work from The New Yorker . . . some of these stories—‘Flying to America,’ ‘Three,’ ‘Tickets’—were among his very best.” —New York Magazine “Donald Barthelme . . . creates a crowd of characters whose struggle ‘ill–advised’ optimism and struggle for meaning mirror his own life’s effort.” —Chicago Tribune
“Barthelme’s legacy resides as much in his sensibility as in the stories themselves. His style melded the personal and the political with reams of detailed book learning. It’s likely a combination of those elements—the confessional, polemical and esoteric (I quiver to think what Barthelme would have done with the Internet)—that people are responding to in his work today. He may have been radical in his time, but he’s perfectly suited to our own.” —Houston Chronicle
“Most of these stories have the signature style that made Barthelme as pervasive through the ’60s as Peter Max—the dialogue that never quite connects, as if two people are talking past each other, the non sequiturs that suggest that literary cause–and–effect is merely artifice, an exercise in absurdity . . . There is the first story that he ever published, using a pseudonym (‘Pages from the Annual Report’), and the last that he published in the New Yorker (‘Tickets’) just months before his 1989 death.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Along with Kurt Vonnegut, Barthelme (1931–1989) was one of the great 20th–century American absurdists . . . Barthelme’s funhouse mirrors reflect the world’s tragicomic essence.” —Publishers Weekly
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