The Glass Mountain

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) published twelve books, including two novels and a prize-winning children's book. A playful, postmodernist writer he wrote stories, satires, parodies and other formal experiments that challenged the forms and subjects of literature before him. He was a regular contributor to the New Yorker and taught creative writing at the University of Houston. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, among others.

A glass mountain sits in the middle of a city and at the top sits a 'beautiful, enchanted symbol'. Seeking to disenchant it, the narrator must climb the mountain. Confronted by the jeers of acquaintances, the bodies of previous climbers and the claws of a guarding eagle he, slowly, begins to ascend. In true postmodernist form, subject and purpose collide as Donald Barthelme uses one-hundred fragmented statements to destabilise a symbol of his own - literature's conventional forms and practices. With a quest, a princess and an array of knights, Barthelme subverts that most traditional of genres, the fairy-tale; irony, absurdity, and playful self-reflexivity are the champions of this short story.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) published twelve books, including two novels and a prize-winning children's book. He was a regular contributor to the New Yorker and taught creative writing at the University of Houston. In his career, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, among others.

'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' 
 
Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. 
 
This book includes Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, The Glass Mountain, I Bought a Little City, The Palace at Four A.M., Chablis, The School, Margins, Game and The Balloon.

Sixty Stories

This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.

Forty Stories

Dave Eggers is the author of seven novels. His seventh novel Heroes of the Frontier was published with Hamish Hamilton. 
 
Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) was the author of seventeen books and the winner of a National Book Award.

This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

Donald Barthelme

"I Bought a Little City [is] a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story - playing god, in a certain way." Donald Antrim, novelist. 
 'Got a little city, ain't it pretty'. 
 Galveston, Texas, has been bought. It suits its new owner just fine. So he starts to change it. He creates a new residential area in the shape of a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle, shoots six thousand dogs, and reminds those who complain that he controls the jail, the police and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. But, playing God has its limitations, which he soon discovers when he starts to covet Sam Hong's wife. With Donald Barthelme's unmistakeable ability to blend absurdity and the recognisable details of ordinary life, this is an uncanny tale about urban planning, capitalism and God.

Donald Barthelme

Books by Donald Barthelme

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter