City Life [Paperback]

Donald barthelme (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket (October 1, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671807706
• ISBN-13: 978-0671807702
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,658,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars clever and crystalline, December 30, 2003

By 

Steven T. Cannon (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Life (Paperback)

These cracked and conceptual stories hide a ruthless and skeptical analysis. So few innovative writers are readable. So few readable writers achieve something worth reading. The astounding formal innovations here are absolutely integral to the work. Barthelme feels like the smartest, funniest, most sarcastic person in your humanities seminar. An example of postmodern fiction that makes resentful continental postmodern criticism obsolete in advance.

To compare. Among modern American writers with ideas about American culture Pynchon competes but sometimes does less with more. These stories are stripped to the skeleton. The omnivorous imagination here is like Borges but the learning of obscure ancient cultures has been replaced by the obscurities of our equally arcane popular culture.

Unless you have to write a dissertation replace Foucault and Derrida with this on your reading list. You'll learn as much and you'll laugh instead of fighting the urge to go back in time and kill the analyst's parents.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A feather under the nose of liberal arts education., January 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: City Life (Paperback)

"City Life" was my intro to Barthelme. I was stunned! Who was this guy, fusing commentary on psychoanalysis and morals with allusions to American TV commercials (Brain Damage)? Rewriting the classics (The Phantom of the Opera's Friend)? Barthelme wrote from perspective of the confounded innocent, astounded by pop culture: to paraphrase from In the Tolstoy Museum, I hope something vivifying happened to him there.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Postmodern short short stories, December 8, 2006

By 

David Adams (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Life (Hardcover)

Story titles are: 1. Views of My Father Weeping 2. Paraguay 3. The Falling Dog 4. At the Tolstoy Museum 5. The Policemen's Ball 6. The Glass Mountain 7. The Explanation 8. Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel 9. The Phantom of the Opera's Friend 10. Sentence 11. Bone Bubbles 12. On Angels 13. Brain Damage 14. City Life. Here you will find Postmodern short fiction with pictures attached. Prose poems, enigmas from the 1970's.