City Life

First Edition. Inscribed to the author Morris Lurie by an unknown person (see picture)
“The most inventive young author writing fiction in America,” in Book World’s words, here enlarges and makes further forays into the imaginative terrain staked out in his three previous books.
The fourteen new stories gathered together in City Life offer sudden, dazzling glimpses of a world very much like our own but with more clearly visible marvels and terrors. In Views of My Father Weeping,” a young man endures a double view of his father, who is simultaneously sitting in his bed weeping and dead under the wheels of an aristocrat’s car-riage. In “The Falling Dog,” an Irish setter falls (or jumps) from a third-floor (or fourth-floor) window on top of a sculptor, whose mind immediately floods with ideas for new work. In two linked stories, “The Explana-tion” and “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” a nameless inquisitor subjects a victim chosen at random to probing questions of the most personal and destructive kind. In the title story two young girls “enter the complicated city” and are instantly involved in a rapidly escalating series of predicaments.
Throughout his exploration of City Life, Donald Barthelme displays the inimitable wit and the astonishing stylistic command that have set him at the forefront of American writing today.