Great Pyramids: Collected Stories

Great Pyramids: Collected Stories

Frederick Barthelme’s fiction portrays the immensity of feeling that saturates the uneventful details of ordinary life. From parking lots to grocery stores, and swimming pools to morning traffic, the inner landscape of Barthelme’s characters is one of underlying tension arising from the seemingly mundane. Meaning breaks down and is doubled, and becomes a representation of the small in-between spaces—lyrical, mysterious, ordinary—within the routines of daily life. Starting out his career as a musician in a psychedelic noise band, and later as a conceptual artist, Barthelme’s breakthrough short fiction soon became a staple of the New Yorker —expanding to eleven novels, short story collections, screenplays, and a memoir.  The Great Pyramids includes early classics such as “Cut Glass,” “Aluminum House,” and “Shopgirls,” as well as later works such as “Retreat” and “Socorro” and previously unpublished stories. The overall sense of angst and isolation in Barthelme’s work—and the urgent need to connect with family, friends, lovers, and strangers—has become even more relevant to our time. This career-spanning collection reflects Barthelme’s compassionate, wry, beguilingly deep observations of cultural estrangement and floating dread—and his sardonic, sometimes absurdist, commonplace-bleak, yet compassionate understanding of how we relate to one another in a world that subverts relationships yet dares us to try. As Bret Easton Ellis conveys in his foreword, Barthelme showed us a new way to look at the world, and helped redefine the short story: a “signal” heard by writers—and readers—of younger generations.   Praise for Frederick Barthelme "He's audacious and writes like no one else—I love these stories.” — Ann Beattie "His textures are impeccable: rich, brightly colored, they seem to float on an underlying vacancy like mirages, leaving the reader dizzy and a little sunstruck. . .it’s impossible to conceive of any writer doing what he does any better than he does it."— Margaret Atwood "I admire his peculiar grasp of the slant side of human relationships. Superbly written and very funny." —Raymond Carver "In the course of such stories, we are allowed to witness tiny, hidden moments of vulnerability, intimacy, and even beauty." —Michiko Kakutani "Barthelme achieves what Chekhov spoke of as grace, the most gained with the least exertion . . . he has shown us the chaos of life, and from it, lifted an order we've not see before." — The San Francisco Chronicle (on Tracer )  "This is very much a novel for these unsettling times, when we are learning to recognize the truth by how deeply we long to disbelieve it." —Francine Prose (on Two Against One ) "Barthelme's take on Americana—dryly funny, despairing, caustic—is also deeply affectionate. This collection shows why this vividly gifted writer has influenced others for years." —Amy Hempel (on The Law of Averages ) “[Barthelme] is one of the most distinctive prose stylists since Hemingway, capable of writing sentences so sharp and crisp and suggestive they have a palpable glow.” — Bret Easton Ellis “Consumer passions didn’t seem pasted on in these stories, but rather create a texture and a spooky land for modern fairy tales. . . . At first glance scenes appear to be surrealistic; then you carry on and realize that this is our urbanized, wised-up America.”   —​ The New York Times Book Review Frederick Barthelme studied fiction with John Barth at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, from which he received his Master of Arts degree. From 1977 to 2010 he taught fiction writing and directed the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He won numerous awards including individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and diverse grants and awards as editor of Mississippi Review and Mississippi Review Online , which he founded and edited. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction and has been published in GQ , Fiction , Kansas Quarterly , Epoch , Ploughshares , Playboy , Esquire , TriQuarterly , North American Review , The New York Times , Frank Magazine , Th e Southern Review , the Boston Globe Magazine , and elsewhere. His work has been translated into nine languages. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss , co-authored with his brother Steven, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded to his collection, Th e Law of Averages . His novel Elroy Nights was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction and is presently editor and publisher of the online literary publication New World Writing (previously Blip Magazine ).