"Fathers are like bloarble, giant cubes, highly polished, with veins and seams, placed squarely in your path. . . They ot be climbed over, her they be slithered past."
The dead father, who is some 3,200 cubits long, is being hauled across the landscape by means of a cable pulled by een or so of his followers. Except the dead father is not really dead. He is past his prime, sexually and authoritatively. He is vain and foolish, but he looms large. He has been a fessor -- his huge, hollow meical leg is large enough to tain fessionals -- and an autocrat. A manual for sons, sample fatherly monologues and tips oifying fathers by color and general habit, is included for the fused. Barthelmes extraordinary retelling of the universal myth of fathers carries echoes of Beckett, Kafka, James Joyce, and Sylvia Plath. His tale evokes memories of Orpheus and King Lear, but also, perhaps, Woody Allen. The Dead Father, wildly id provocative, brims with energy and literary antics.
"The Dead Father is funny, angry, marvelous -- an astonishing book, the best book so far by an already prodigious writer." -- Susan Sontag
"The delight he offers to readers is beyond question; his individuality is unmatched. He has now moved to the forefront of the porary iihilists . . ." -- Los Aimes
Cover design by Todd Radom
Cover illustration by Lonnie Sue Johnson