Great Pyramids: Collected Stories - Hardcover

by Frederick Barthelme (Author), Bret Easton Ellis (Foreword by)

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"Cut Glass," "Aluminum House," and "Shopgirls," as well as later works such as "Retreat" and "Socorro" and previously unpublished stories.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.

Author Biography

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, NorthAmerican 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 onGambling 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).