Reminder: Quiz Wednesday + Barthelme Links

Don't forget that we'll begin Wednesday's class with a quick quiz mostly covering The Dead Father, with a little bit of Sixty Stories thrown in (three or four of them, to be exact). As I said in Monday's class, we'll have two last quizes this week and next, so that folks who weren't happy with their performance on them so far have a chance to pull their grades up a little bit. Next week's will focus solely on Sixty Stories.

That having been said, here are a few links to broaden your experience of Donald Barthelme's work.

Essentials first:

• Jessamyn West's barthelmismo is without a doubt the most thorough web resource for Barthelme's writing on the web, including numerous complete stories, excerpts from larger works, essays on Barthelme, etc. On her YouTube channel, you can also hear her read a number of Barthelme stories.
• Louis Menand's "Saved From Drowning," a recent review of Hiding Man, a new Barthelme biography (named after a story from his debut collection) and a reappraisal of his writing career, is a must-read, particularly for the way in which it frames the dynamics between modernism and postmodernism in his work.
  
• Another great site, albeit a rather specialized one, is A Donald Barthelme Collection, which showcases the many different covers for all of Barthelme's books, as well as some rare publications and broadsides. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a little while.
  

Here are some links from The New York Times:

• Barthelme's obituary, from July 24, 1989
• A tribute to Barthelme, from another postmodern titan, John Barth
• "The Way of Don B.," Lisa Zeidner's appraisal, nearly a decade after his death
• the Times' review of Sixty Stories
  

A handful of other links:

• New York reviews Flying to America, a 2007 volume of Barthelme's final uncollected stories.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer's review of Hiding Man
• The Buffalo News reviews the same
• Donald Antrim reads "I Bought a Little City" (which you'll be reading next week) on this New Yorker podcast

Finally, here's a wonderfully dated public service announcement from MTV's golden age, in which Timothy Hutton reads from Forty Stories' "Chablis":



Now go "feed your head," y'all!