Frederick Barthleme, Author, Frederick Barthelme, Author Penguin Books $10.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-14-013209-0
This funny, understated and ruminative novel about the vexed relationship of two middle-aged brothers reflects the author's familiar interest in marital strife and midlife depression. (Dec.)
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author . Counterpoint $24 (224p) ISBN 978-1-58243-128-4
This slight story of midlife crisis and fantasy romance follows Barthelme's familiar path along the southern Gulf Coast. Elroy Nights is a 50-something art professor at a small, third-rate Mississippi university. Amicably separated from his wife,
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author . Doubleday $24.95 (229p) ISBN 978-0-385-52729-3
In his first novel since PEN/Faulkner finalist Elroy Nights
, Barthelme offers a strangely detached exploration of the post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf Coast. One year after the hurricane and a divorce, Vaughn Williams has more or less recovered from...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Penguin Books $11.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-14-024214-0
This California road novel, from the acclaimed avant-gardiste, unfolds in the shadow of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder and the L.A. riots. (Apr.)
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Penguin Books $6.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-008274-6
A contemporary marital union is the framework for Barthelme's first novel, which is marked by his ability to make ordinary events magically revelatory, to make the familiar vicissitudes of marriage startling. Although the rich wit occasionally sags...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Simon & Schuster $15.45 (173p) ISBN 978-0-671-54255-9
Most of these 15 short stories tell of middle-class people living ordinary lives. They suffer from such minor ailments as insomnia or contact lens problems. Their eccentricities are minuscule, their affairs half-hearted. They live in similar homes...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author George Weidenfeld & Nicholson $0 (264p) ISBN 978-1-55584-214-7
Edward Lasco gets a surprise on his 40th birthday: his wife Elise, who left him six months before to become an independent woman, comes home . . . with her boyfriend Roscoe. But they're not sleeping together, Elise insists, because Roscoe, an...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Viking Books $18.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-670-83113-5
Barthelme's bracingly cynical novel of marital discord and midlife crisis in a Houston suburb aches with tenderness and hurt. At 40 Peter Wexler feels ``stuck in the job, in the life, marking time.'' He tells his nine-year-old son things like ``You'r
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Penguin Books $8.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-012889-5
Peter Wexler, 40 years old and entrenched in a midlife crisis, separates from his second wife and their son for some soul-searching. ``The Darwinian overtones of the novel's title take on a dark irony in the shattering, unforeseen finale, whose...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Viking Books $21 (272p) ISBN 978-0-670-83242-2
Weird ironies of American mass culture highlight the quandaries of characters reaching middle age in Barthelme's understated, low-key tale of filial relations and midlife crises set in contemporary Mississippi. Shortly before his 44th birthday,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $23 (213p) ISBN 978-0-395-80977-8
Clear-sighted, decent Ray Kaiser narrates his sudden capitulation to the allure of Biloxi's Paradise Casino in Barthelme's (Moon Deluxe; Painted Desert) deftly comic and gently melancholic 11th book. Abandoning his unremunerative architecture firm (r
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author Counterpoint LLC $25 (352p) ISBN 978-1-58243-115-4
There are writers who believe they need a giant canvas to represent history, while others know they can convey as much in an exquisitely detailed miniature. This collection of 29 stories, including several new ones and spanning 20 years of the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme, Author, Steven Barthelme, Joint Author Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) $24 (224p) ISBN 978-0-395-95429-4
In the legal system, whoever tells the best story wins. But when two ""workaday English teachers""--who happen to be the writers Frederick Barthelme (Bob the Gambler) and Steven Barthelme (And He Tells the Horse the Whole Story)--gamble away their $2
READ FULL REVIEW
Frederick Barthelme. Little, Brown, $25 (304p) ISBN 978-0-316-23124-4
Barthelme, a master of minimalist suburbia-set fiction (Waveland), returns with a buoyantly offbeat murder tale that doubles as a meditation on everything from contemporary art to Google to mortality. The setting is Forgetful Bay, a condo...
READ FULL REVIEW
