Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“A seemingly random series of events, and yet they beguile us with the sort of surreal clarity and brightness of objects glimpsed in a Hockney painting.” –The New York Times
Frederick Barthelme has been applauded as one of the finest contemporary fiction writers in America today.” In Chroma, a marvelous collection of stories, he offers us fifteen odd, elegant, and heartbreaking tales in which wives give away husbands, lovers dispatch each other, and grown men steal stray dogs from parking lots at dawn.” With his elegant, laconic style and his perfectly tuned dialogue, Frederick Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.
“A seemingly random series of events, and yet they beguile us with the sort of surreal clarity and brightness of objects glimpsed in a Hockney painting.” –The New York Times
“Each sentence is so carefully, so seductively plain and seemingly innocent that the reader doesn’t notice the meanness and the madness of this writer’s USA until it’s too late. . . . Barthelme tries time after time to strip away the excess of our lives–and the fat in our rhetoric–to produce a story both usefully spare and accidentally beautiful.” –Chicago Tribune
“Consumer passions didn’t seem pasted on in these stories, but rather create a texture and a spooky land for modern fairy tales. . . . At first glance scenes appear to be surrealistic; then you carry on and realize that this is our urbanized, wised-up America.” –The New York Times Book Review
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
