The Early Posthumous Work

by Steven Barthelme

Overview

A collection of essays and occasional pieces on gambling, teaching, snakes, dogs, cars, hitchhiking, marriage and sophistication, memory and work, and a dozen other subjects. One essay announces that the two dollar bill can buy happiness and reports some resistance to this discovery. Another studies the art of life as a ne'er-do-well, a sort of prequel to the "slacker" phenomenon, written and published in Austin, Texas. In yet another essay, everyone's first name is Philip, (except the comet). Certain liberties are taken with the form. Pieces originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, the Texas Observer, Connecticut Review, Apalachee Quarterly, and other newspapers, magazines, and anthologies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597093880
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	02/01/2010
Edition description:	1
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Steven Barthelme has published short stories extensively in periodicals, in Pushcart and other anthologies, and in the collection And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story.  A memoir, Double Down, co-authored with his brother Frederick, was issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1999.  With a long-time interest in non-fiction, he has written pieces for the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Texas Observer, Oxford American, and other newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies. He writes and teaches in Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

There’s a much-vaunted notion of writing as craft, but precisely what is meant by this is not often clear. Steven Barthelme’s essays serve as the best of definitions.  They afford us the complete pleasure of hearing a thing said with utmost economy and utmost elegance, the two being one.  In essay after essay, Barthelme finds memory’s perfect pitch. His experience becomes ours: a 1966 TR4-A in need of endless reassembly, Speckled King snakes in their unsung beauty, boyhood dogs whose humans mirror them, a father whose belief that all was possible, and that a good house was not made and left alone, but constantly remade in pursuit of a happy ideal: “All you needed was the willingness to care”—a willingness found everywhere in this collection, along with the compensatory and permanent power of words, crafted by a master.

—Angela Ball

Reading The Early Posthumous Work of Steve Barthelme is like having a scintillating conversation with a much smarter friend, a friend with an enterprising sense of wonder and a faithfulness to the ambiguity of life. There’s not a moment of self-absorption in these wise, wry, and wildly entertaining essays. Barthelme pays attention to our world, celebrates our fragile and complicated lives, and opens a space in front of us so we can see more clearly.

—John Dufresne, Requiem, Mass.

From the Publisher