Author(s): Donald Barthelme

Fiction

'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.' Donald Barthelme is a puckish player with language, a writer of short but endlessly rewarding comic gems, a thinker and an experimenter. In these nine short stories, whether writing about a hairy, donkeyish king or a touching, private gesture of city-sized proportions, his is a surreal, deadpan genius. This book includes "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby", "The Glass Mountain", "I Bought a Little City", "The Palace at Four A.M.", "Chablis", "The School", "Margins", "Game", and "The Balloon".