Short stories
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
Donald Barthelme · 1968
Synopsis
Fifteen short stories. In “The Indian Uprising”, Comanches attack a town that the narrator defends behind a barricade of household objects, bottles, ashtrays, pillows, while he builds tables for the women he has lived with. In “The Balloon”, an irregular balloon appears above Manhattan and spreads north from 14th Street; the inhabitants stroll on it, and the authorities cannot destroy it. A series of brief scenes about a politician named K. gives contradictory images of him.
Context
The volume is its author's second collection, after the one of 1964, and contains several of his most frequently reprinted stories, including the one about the balloon and the one about the Indian uprising. The story about K. appeared two months before the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Barthelme regarded postwar American painting as “a laboratory for everyone” and made collage the principle of his art. The collection was translated into French in 1972, in a volume that also takes in stories from the first.
Who it is for
Very short stories, to be read one at a time. Nothing in them is narrated in the ordinary sense. Translated into French, with others, by Céline Zins.
Prizes and reception
A 1968 collection in which The Balloon has entered many anthologies, and The Indian Uprising that of Norton.
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