Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer of minimalist fiction. He is the director of the Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and editor of the literary journal Mississippi Review. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine)
Early life
Barthelme was born in Houston, Texas. He was a founding member of the avant-garde experimental rock band The Red Krayola, and would later leave the band to pursue writing and conceptual art in New York. He'd go on to become a novelist like his brother, Donald Barthelme.
Style
Barthelme's works focus on the landscape of the New South. Along with his reputation as a minimalist (similar to Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison), Barthelme's work has also been described by terms such as "dirty realism" and "Kmart realism". He published his first short story in The New Yorker.
Barthelme was thirty-three-year editor of Mississippi Review, known for recognizing and publishing once new talents such as Larry Brown, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Amy Hempel early in their careers. Issues of Mississippi Review have been guest-edited by authors Rick Moody and Mary Robison among others.
Awards
1976-77 Eliot Coleman Award for prose from Johns Hopkins University for his short story, "Storyteller." 1979, 1980 National Endowment for the Arts grant 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction nomination for Elroy Nights. 2010 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters fiction award for Waveland
Bibliography
"Driver", The Barcelona Review
Story Collections
Rangoon 1970. Moon Deluxe Simon & Schuster, 1983. Chroma Simon & Schuster, 1987. The Law of Averages: New & Selected Stories Counterpoint, 2000. "trip" (text) photographs by Susan Lipper Powerhouse Books, 1998.
Novels (fiction) War and War 1971. Second Marriage New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Tracer New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Two Against One New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. Natural Selection New York: Viking, 1989. The Brothers New York: Viking, 1993. Painted Desert New York: Viking, 1995. Bob the Gambler Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997. Elroy Nights Cambridge: Counterpoint, 2003. Waveland New York: Doubleday, 2009. There Must Be Some Mistake New York: Little Brown, 2014.
Memoirs (non-fiction) (With Steven Barthelme) Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Screenplays
Second Marriage 1985. Tracer 1986.
References
Further reading
Brinkmeyer, Robert H. "Suburban Culture, Imaginative Wonder: The Fiction of Frederick Barthelme." Studies in the Literary Imagination 27 (Fall 1994): 105–1. Hughes, John C. The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme: A Literary Critical Analysis. Lewiston: Mellen: 2005. Peters, Timothy. "The Eighties Pastoral: Frederick Barthelme's Moon Deluxe Ten Years On." Studies in Short Fiction 31.2 (Spring 1994): 175–95.