The Great Pyramids

Frederick Barthelme is a minimalist writer whose stories are anything but minimal. Labeled as “Dirty” or “Kmart” Realism, his work illustrates the immense feeling contained within the minute and seemingly uneventful details of ordinary life. From parking lots to grocery stores, and swimming pools to morning traffic, whatever space Barthelme’s characters occupy there is an underlying tension that rises out from the mundane. In his post-ironic dialog and deadpan descriptions, meaning breaks down and is doubled, and becomes a representation of the small in-between spaces within our routine and daily lives.

Starting out his career as a musician in a psychedelic noise band, and later as a conceptual artist, Barthelme’s tendency for the unconventional carried over in his writing. He became a trailblazer with his work regularly appearing in the New Yorker and went on to have an expansive career that includes eleven novels, several short story collections, screenplays, and a memoir. In The Great Pyramids, Barthelme is recognized from his early works such as “Cut Glass,” “Aluminum House,” and “Shopgirls,” through the tail end of the twentieth century with “Retreat,” and “Socorro,” and now, with new and previously unpublished stories.

The cultural landscape is always changing, but the overall sense of angst and isolation that Barthelme’s work encompasses has only intensified. This collection shows that Barthelme’s eye for cultural estrangement, the funny yet bleak understanding of how we relate to one another, is now more relevant than ever.
 

Frederick Barthelme studied fiction with John Barth at The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in the mid-seventies, from which he received his Master of Arts degree. From 1977-2010 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, the literary magazine he edited in print 1977-2010, and for the independent electronic magazine Mississippi Review Online which he founded and edited 1995-2010. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction including Moon Deluxe, Second Marriage, Tracer, Two Against One, Natural Selection, The Brothers, Painted Desert, Bob the Gambler, Elroy Nights, and Waveland. He provided texts for Susan Lipper’s 1999 book of photographs, Trip, and is an occasional contributor to The New Yorker. He has published fiction and nonfiction in GQ, Fiction, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank, The Southern Review, the Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into nine languages. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded his retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages. His novel Elroy Nights was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2009 he published Waveland, a novel set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast a year after Katrina. 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 Blip Magazine.

Praise for Frederick Barthelme

"He's audacious and writes like no one else—I love these stories.” —Ann Beattie

"His textures are impeccable: rich, brightly colored, they seem to float on an underlying vacancy like mirages, leaving the reader dizzy and a little sunstruck. . .it’s impossible to conceive of any writer doing what he does any better than he does it."—Margaret Atwood

"I admire his peculiar grasp of the slant side of human relationships. Superbly written and very funny."—Raymond Carver

"In the course of such stories, we are allowed to witness tiny, hidden moments of vulnerability, intimacy, and even beauty."—Michiko Kakutani

"Barthelme achieves what Chekhov spoke of as grace, the most gained with the least exertion . . . he has shown us the chaos of life, and from it, lifted an order we've not see before."—The San Francisco Chronicle (on Tracer)

 "This is very much a novel for these unsettling times, when we are learning to recognize the truth by how deeply we long to disbelieve it."—Francine Prose (on Two Against One)

"Barthelme's take on Americana—dryly funny, despairing, caustic—is also deeply affectionate. This collection shows why this vividly gifted writer has influenced others for years."—Amy Hempel (on The Law of Averages)

“[Barthelme] is one of the most distinctive prose stylists since Hemingway, capable of writing sentences so sharp and crisp and suggestive they have a palpable glow.” —Bret Easton Ellis

“Consumer passions didn’t seem pasted on in these stories, but rather create a texture and a spooky land for modern fairy tales. . . . At first glance scenes appear to be surrealistic; then you carry on and realize that this is our urbanized, wised-up America.”  —​The New York Times Book Review