The Beauty Of Ordinary Stuff In Frederick Barthelme S Short Stories

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Stuttgart, course: American short fiction, language: English, abstract: The beauty of the ordinary stuff is an important element of minimalist literature. Especially Frederick Barthelme used elements like brands, surfaces, malls, parking lots - ordinary stuff - in his short stories. His special way of writing concerning things of everyday life is analyzed in this term paper.

Frederick Barthelme has been applauded as one of the finest fiction writers in America today. In Chroma, he offers fifteen odd, elegant, and heartbreaking stories in which wives give away husbands, lovers dispatch each other, and grown men steal stray dogs from parking lots at dawn. With his elegant, laconic style and his perfectly tuned dialogue, Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.

"Along with his new girlfriend, Jen, a rough kid who publishes her own little terrorzine and just finished living in the back of a van with a guy who sells bikinis to tourists, Del tries to repair the damage he imagines is done to his relation with his brother Bud, and in the process tries to recapture and reinvent the sense of family long missing from his life. This all happens in Biloxi, on the dirty, soured, dinky coast of Mississippi, pretty much as it is right now: blisteringly hot, sandy, under construction, but still oddly foreign and magical. With these middle-class folks as his primary cast, Barthelme deftly demonstrates that there is enough beauty and wonder in ordinary life to satisfy all of us, if we only watch out for it - watch out for the light decaying over black trees, the raid that creeps up windshields, the sight and sound and smell of everyday. In The Brothers, bit players skewer the stiffs of the culture, the runaways add runaway priests, the do-gooders, the way-too-earnest and the way-too-cynical, the fairly smart, the broadcast morons who for God knows what reasons we attend night after night. And when they drive in this novel - and they do drive - the highway is a big sculpture, a stage for drifters, boneheads, self-parodies, error-handlers, a ride-through zoo where we witness the many edges of cultural disenchantment, where we are the exhibit and the sightseer, too.".

“An exquisitely crafted memoir” by two brothers who lost their parents, lost their inheritance—and almost lost their freedom (The Wall Street Journal). Frederick Barthelme and his brother Steven were both accomplished, respected writers with stable adult lives when they lost both of their parents in rapid succession. They had already lost their other brother, just a few years earlier. Suddenly they were on their own, emotionally unmoored—and unprepared for what would happen next. Their late father had been a prominent architect, and the brothers were left with a healthy inheritance. Over the following several years, they would lose close to a quarter million dollars in the gambling boats off the Mississippi coast. Then, in a bizarre twist, they were charged with violating state gambling laws, fingerprinted, and thrown into the surreal world of felony prosecution. For two years these widely publicized charges hung over their heads, shadowing their every step. Double Down is the wry, often heartbreaking story of how Frederick and Steven Barthelme got into this predicament. It is also a reflection on the allure of casinos and the pull and power of illusions that can destroy our lives if we aren’t careful. “One of the best firsthand accounts ever written about organized gambling. Like Goodman Brown, taking a walk with a hooded stranger into the darkness of the New England woods, the Barthelme brothers suddenly find themselves inside the maw of the monster. The compulsion to control, to intuit the future, to be painted by magic, could not be better or more accurately described.” —James Lee Burke “Beautifully evoking the gamblers’ addiction, their mesmerizing account is best read as a novel Camus might have imagined, with the writer/protagonists as their own lost characters. A work of high art; enthusiastically recommended.” —Library Journal

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.

Focuses on how the declining market for short-story writers after World War II saw the migration of these writers to universities where they not only continued to write, but established creative writing classes that would in turn inspire and develop new generations of writers of various genres.

“Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself.