Recently collected in a Penguin Mini Modern Classic, 2011 Posted on MaMaby Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Joe Dunthorne Tagged Donald Barthelme. Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby is the title story in the tiny book and it’s the one I come back to most often, marvelling at its balance of funny and serious, heartfelt and heartless.įirst published in The New Yorker, May, 1973, and available for subscribers to read here, then collected in Amateurs, 1976. Now I like to read him in short bursts as a palate cleanser, a little explosion of possibility. Years later, I bought one of those miniature, slightly-gimmicky Penguin editions they sell by the tills in bookshops – and only then it clicked. The book was not helped by its joy-sapping introductory essay which placed Barthelme in the context of his time and instantly turned him into homework. On their own, the stories might well have been wonders of surprise and invention but I couldn’t feel surprised for 480 pages. I remember buying Barthelme’s Sixty Stories and thinking it was a bit much. Leave a comment ‘Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby’ by Donald Barthelme Listen to it here Posted on MaMaby Jonathan Gibbs Posted in Joe Dunthorne Tagged Anne Carson.

Anthologised in The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem, 2018. (This may also be the only story that successfully uses its title as a final line.) It’s not published online but I recommend listening to her read it (from 3.15 onwards.) When I hear the bookshop audience’s silence I wonder if I’m alone in finding the story, and her deadpan delivery, very funny.įirst published in Float, Jonathan Cape, 2016. Whatever it is, it’s four hundred and five words of perfection, with Carson managing to handbrake turn from desolate to comic to profound and back again, sometimes within the same sentence. I discovered this in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, which suggests it’s a prose poem, though when Anne Carson talks about it she calls it an essay – and yet it could just as easily be a short story.

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