The Early Posthumous Work [Paperback]

A collection of essays and occasional pieces on gambling, teaching, snakes, dogs, cars, hitchhiking, marriage and sophistication, memory and work, and a dozen other subjects.  One essay announces that the two dollar bill can buy happiness and reports some resistance to this discovery. Another studies the art of life as a ne'er-do-well, a sort of prequel to the "slacker" phenomenon, written and published in Austin, Texas. In yet another essay, everyone's first name is Philip, (except the comet). Certain liberties are taken with the form.  Pieces originally appeared in theNew York Times Magazine, theLos AngelesTimes,OxfordAmerican, theTexasObserver,ConnecticutReview,Apalachee Quarterly, and other newspapers, magazines, and anthologies.

There’s a much-vaunted notion of writing as craft, but precisely what is meant by this is not often clear. Steven Barthelme’s essays serve as the best of definitions.  They afford us the complete pleasure of hearing a thing said with utmost economy and utmost elegance, the two being one.  In essay after essay, Barthelme finds memory’s perfect pitch. His experience becomes ours: a 1966 TR4-A in need of endless reassembly, Speckled King snakes in their unsung beauty, boyhood dogs whose humans mirror them, a father whose belief that all was possible, and that a good house was not made and left alone, but constantly remade in pursuit of a happy ideal: “All you needed was the willingness to care”—a willingness found everywhere in this collection, along with the compensatory and permanent power of words, crafted by a master.

—Angela Ball

ReadingThe Early Posthumous Workof Steve Barthelme is like having a scintillating conversation with a much smarter friend, a friend with an enterprising sense of wonder and a faithfulness to the ambiguity of life. l£$