Great Pyramids: Collected Stories

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＂Cut Glass,＂ ＂Aluminum House,＂ and ＂Shopgirls,＂ as well as later works such as ＂Retreat＂ and ＂Socorro＂ and previously unpublished stories.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

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.