Amateurs

More Donald Barthelme to be listed soon…
First Edition
“The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love. Which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.” These closing words of “Rebecca,” one of the twenty remarkable short stories in Donald Barthelme’s new collection, Amateurs, embody one of the book’s most persistent themes. For example, in “The School” the children complain because they’ve heard so much about love but never seen it, and clamor for a classroom demonstration. In “The Captured Woman” many techniques are explored, ranging from tranquilizing darts, a lasso, and the Dionysiac frenzy to Jack Daniel’s and beyond.
Mrs. Davis in “At the End of the Mechanical Age” reveals that the institution of marriage is deeply enmeshed with the laws of mechanics.The incredible purchasing power of the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” (it was Galveston, Texas) cannot procure him the Oriental-novel-ties storekeeper’s wife.
The deadpan wit and magical mockery of Barthelme’s fictional style make Amateurs a marvelous book. “He has an ear as deadly as a black belt’s hand,” Richard Todd has said in The Atlantic. “He speaks dozens of the specialized dialects that make up our language, and he mocks their pretension and the pretentious surety of those who use them.”