The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories

The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories - Paperback

$19.53
$19.53
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The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories
  • The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories
The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories - Paperback

The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories - Paperback

by Frederick Barthelme
$19.53
$19.53

Book Overview

by Frederick Barthelme (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Frederick Barthelme was a founding member, with Mayo Thompson, of the art/noise/psychedelic rock band Red Krayola, and a painter and conceptual artist in Houston and New York in the late 1960s. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Fiction, Epoch, GQ, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank, The Southern Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. The memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded his retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages and his novel Elroy Nights, which was also one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2009 he published Waveland, a novel set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast a year after Katrina. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.

Number of Pages: 384
Dimensions: 0.99 x 8.25 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: June 22, 2001
ISBN9781582431574
Author Frederick Barthelme
PublisherCounterpoint LLC
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedJune 2001
LanguageENG- English
Pages384
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Literary Short Stories

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More by Frederick Barthelme

Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss

Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss - Paperback

Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss - Paperback

By Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme

About Frederick Barthelme

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, The 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, The 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).

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