Overnight to Many Distant Cities

📕 "Overnight to Many Distant Cities", Donald Barthelme's new collection and his first since Sixty Stories in 1981, takes us from New York to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Barcelona to Paris to the Radiant City of Le Corbusier, balancing twelve of his widely celebrated short stories against an equal number of brief visionary texts, new in his work, that provide a lovely, haunting counterpoint. In the stories, a fiftyish art historian meets a beautiful young woman who resembles the Indian woman who sells Mazola on TV; a journalist for a magazine called Folks sets out to interview nine people who have been struck by lightning; Captain Blood learns that even the most wildly successful pirate may end up with a spider monkey for a wife; and a retired messman steals fifty-three moth-balled ships from the government of the United States. "In London 1 met a man who was not in love," writes Barthelme, and gives us the consequences, alternatives, decisions and indecisions of people for whom the future remains, at whatever cost, open. "Is the real world a little tedious, a bit trivial?" Anne Tyler asked, in a review of Sixty Stories, and then went on to say, "Donald Barthelme's is not - and best of all, his is the real world, magically transformed by his microscopic vision and uncanny ear". "Overnight to Many Distant Cities" is magical, and masterful as well.