SIXTY STORIES

Description

Though far less known, Donald Barthelme ranks right up there with Burroughs, John Barth and Pynchon as one of the key American authors of the long sixties. Barthelme’s short stories are by turns bizarre, ingenious, hilarious and bleak, infused with both the spirit of counterculture and literary postmodernism. Sixty Stories brings together all of his best-known works up to 1979, including ‘On Angels’, which refers to the writings of Swedenborg; though the ironic treatment of an angelic heaven suddenly bereft of a god would hardly have impressed the Swedish philosopher, we are reminded of the striking breadth of contexts on which Swedenborg’s writing has left its mark.

For more on Swedenborg’s influence on the culture of the 1960s and beyond, see D T Suzuki’s Buddha of the North and John S Haller’s Distant Voices.