“Edward was explaining to Carl about margins.” This collection includes “The School” which along with “I Bought a Little City” (also in this collection) is worth the price of admission for me. That story includes one of the most subtly devastating lines in all of literature: “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.” In a previous review about one of Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White, I talked about how it wasn’t much like a lot of his stories, and while I think that’s true, […]

“She is a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots” I wasn’t sure what a reread of this book was going to bring me. But I did it. The reread did go better than the initial one, but I am not sure I liked it any better when it comes down to it. This book is a retelling of Snow White, but with a lot of artifice and structure stripped out of it. So this postmodern rendering of it is often told in […]