你一直在玩

Have been reading some short stories of Donald Barthelme.

Actually, this is Donald’s Forty Stories, his last published story collection. Looks like CTPC changed nothing but the book title and cover when they published it in early 1990s.  (Good point is that they also provided some annotation.)

I bought this book eight years ago, when I was in high school…See? It could take such a long time for people to read books they buy. Honestly I knew nothing about him when I bought it in 1998, out from a shabby corner of the bookshelf I dragged it.
The first story, Chablis, starts with: My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.
Then I bought it. But stopped at the first story, for years, and never finished the second one.
(From this I learned: do not judge a book by its first line…)

Now I totally love this book and this guy! Instead of more traditional novels, I love his flash fictions, usually no more than 5,6 pages, which make my great reading materials before going to work in the morning.
Often classified as a postmodernist writer, his short stories are compact, experimental, sarcastically humorous, and sometimes presented with weird graphics or illustrations.
Questions, a lot of them; simple sentences, also a lot of them; are even stacked up into paragraphs, repeatedly. Ah, I do like that, a bit nagging, and meaningless; but within these kind of constant clash and clutter I find joy and humor. The dialogues are many times broken and segmental, like riding on a bumpy road, abrupt, hard to predict or even follow: sometimes more like self-talking to me.

I wonder where I can get one copy of Sixty Stories.