Frederick Barthelme

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.

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.

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. - Publisher's Website (Penguin Random House)

On this Sunday, after the NFL preseason game, we were sitting on the porch quiet as mice when Jewel held up the newspaper and said, "Raymond. Let's go here and do this," and "here" was the Paradise casino, a dozen blocks away on the beach in Biloxi, and "this" was gambling. So begins this story in which Ray and Jewel Kaiser try out the Paradise. What curious things happen to them, what tricks of chance involving, among others, Jewel's fourteen-year-old daughter RV, the casino and its personnel, Ray's dead father, and a mother convinced that a sitcom star is visiting across the street from her house, make up the fabric of this novel about wising up better late than never. Peopled with dazed casino denizens, a lusty grocery-store manager, body-pierced children, and hourly employees in full revolt, Bob the Gambler tells the refreshing story of a couple who, after tumbling headfirst out of their middle-class Garden of Eden, discover they've landed in an even more fertile garden outside its walls.

Frederick Barthelme's haunting new novel picks up where his acclaimed previous book, The Brothers, left off. Junior college professor Del Tribute and his cyber-muckraker friend Jen catch some old news footage of the L.A. riots, some of that vivid close-up slow motion shaky-cam stuff with the fires blazing and people getting trashed, and Jen, in particular, is incensed by the barbarity of the scene. At her insistence she and Del, her father, Mike, and her friend Penny decide to step out of the shadows and head to ground zero - Los Angeles - to do something, anything, about this particular horror. Their journey takes them from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, from Alamogordo to the kitschy tourist sites of New Mexico and Arizona. Jen sets up a scourge of e-mail spamming and internet newsgroup posts about the atrocities of the riots, but then one night in Dallas she gets a strange message back from a guy in Las Vegas named Durrell Dobson, who really believes that anarchy is the only game in town. He's sympathetic about the riots, but his messages are filled with bizarre personal sex histories, terrorism threats, an evangelical froth of retribution. As Jen and company make their way west, they discover a fondness for the goofy tourist sites and the land itself and, as Dobson continues to jack up the vengeance rhetoric via e-mail, Jen has second thoughts. Maybe she and Del aren't supposed to be great avengers, maybe just seeing the odd and spectacular world around them is more important than scratching out Evil. Maybe, but Dobson is out there and boiling. His urgent messages rip veils off his schemes, name victims, reveal strategies, and Jen feels oddly responsible for his fervor. How Jen and Del and the others resolve their conflicted interests, and the shocking acts they may have encouraged, provides the eccentric and nuanced conclusion to this ferocious, touching novel of character, culture, and the media. In The Brothers Barthelme went for more than culture snapshots; here he pulls all stops, committing his characters to a fresh and remarkably poignant embrace of the contemporary world with all of its ordinary and beautiful flaws.

Set against the background of a civil war and likely influenced by the events occuring in Spain, Wells presents a satire written in the form of an allegory. Bolaris was fiercely loyal to the Strong Men. So when Number Four informed him that Ratzel, leader of the enemy, had been captured, it was naturally a cause for celebration - that was until Bolaris actually met his great opponent. The likeness between Bolaris and Ratzel was so remarkable that Bolaris was left in no doubt that they were related - brothers, or perhaps even twins. As sworn enemies, and now as his captor, Bolaris had to work out a way to discover the truth of his identity - and do so without sacrificing his loyalty.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Second Marriage, Frederick Barthelme's first novel, follows on the heels of Moon Deluxe, his acclaimed collection of stories, and is certain to enhance Barthelme's reputation as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation. As Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Times Book Review in her front-page review of his work, "It is impossible to conceive of any writer doing what he does better than he does it." The novel tells the story of the marriage between Henry and Theo-her first, his second-of their life together, their separation, and the events that ensure. Set in typical Barthelme territory-the new South of suburban communities, clipped lawns, busy shopping centers, fast-food drive-ins, and backyard swimming pools-Second Marriage displays the cool, affectionate observation of place and character and the command of craft that have distinguished Barthelme's previous fiction. The story begins with Henry's first wife Clare, in flight from her present life, moves in with Henry and Thea. The new arrangement has its peculiar effects. Theo doesn't want to be married anymore. Henry does-and is willing to take his chances waiting. And wait he must, through a series of quirky, comic, and sometimes painful events that immerse the reader in a world of familiar yet slightly bewildering pleasures and sorrows before the trajectory of the novel turns homeward. Second Marriage celebrates the strangeness and excitement of the everyday. "What Barthelme does best is precisely what fiction should do." writes the Texas Monthly. "He makes the familiar seems strange and the strange seem familiar." Written with the intimate knowledge and wry affection that characterize his stories, the novel exhibits a new command and depth of insight that mark an important step in Barthelme's career. Second Marriage is sharp, funny, odd and turns perplexing and heartbreaking. It is a joy to read. Barthelme's first novel is the most intriguing work to date by this brilliant American writer.

Frederick Barthelme's stories portray with humor, detachment, precision, and deep affection that everyday world of contemporary America. Rarely has a writer, so caught the mood and tempo of our daily lives, with their shopping malls, small businesses, suburban neighbors, and busy quotidian affairs. Now Moon Deluxe brings together seventeen of these wonderful pieces, ranging in subject from the jockeying between the sexes to small town life to the vagaries of the individual-all bathed in a dry lyricism that captures the humor and dignity of our ordinary lives. Barthelme's characters inhabit a world of Subarus and suburban swimming pools, of polo shirts and quick good stands and neighborhood traffic jams. From these townscapes. Barthelme has distilled with splendid economy of means and trenchant will something of the strangeness of life, its surprising encounters and bizarre juxtapositions. While depicting the commonplace, his stories take on the atmosphere of quiet meditations, now amusing, now troubling, now unexpected, but invariably suffused with a quality of reticent but deep-felt affection. "There are things that cannot be understood-things said at school; at the supermarket; or in this case by the pool of Santa Rosa Apartments on a lazy afternoon in midsummer." So begins "Pool Lights." Barthelme is a master at suggesting the unusual that lies just below the surface of the familiar. One of his stories opens with a woman, fully clad, throwing herself into a swimming pool. "The Browns" describes with marvelous humor the falling out between two families whose dog begin to fight. "Moon Deluxe," the title story, recounts the events of a casual suburban dinner gathering that gradually assumes something of the sheen of a mysterious rite. Throughout Barthelme's sensitivity to nuance, to atmosphere and surrounding detail, reminds one, in its subtlety and psychological effect, of the Japanese masters.

"After years of standing by their women, the Sisterhood's significant others have also become loyal friends. And now Jack Emery, Nikki's husband, has enlisted Ted, Joe, Jay, Bert, Dennis, and Abner to form a top-secret organization known as BOLO Consultants." --

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 offbeat affair that begins with his being locked in an Airstream trailer attached to the roof of her restaurant. He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to ponder his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense.