titles / On the Way to My
Father's Funeral: New and Selected Stories by Jonathan Baumbach
read an excerpt | read reviews
“He’s an exceptional writer, one of the best I know--inventive,
controlled, witty, sensitive, a great risk-taker who seems the equal
of any risk. I can think of few authors who can deliver an entire set
of stories of such class as these.” —Robert Coover
on Baumbach's The Return of Service
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On the Way to My Father's
Funeral:
New and Selected Stories
by Jonathan Baumbach
Trade Paperback
Price: $16.00
410 pages / 5.5X8.5
ISBN 0-9723363-3-8
Pub. Date: Jan. 15, 2005
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Here are thirteen new stories and Baumbach’s selected,
which have appeared in such diverse compilations as Full Court:
A Literary Anthology of Basketball, On the Couch: Great American
Stories About Therapy, Transgressions: The Iowa Anthology of
Innovative Fiction, Byrne's Book of Great Pool Stories,
Show Me a Hero: Great Contemporary Stories about Sports, The
Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories—collected
together for the first time. Whether they star a mild-mannered psychologist
with a fondness for female patients or a King Kong-like giant ape with
a human-sized penis or a female patient with a fondness for mild-mannered
psychologists, Baumbach consistently reinvents traditional character-type
and the traditional story.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Known mainly for his novels, Jonathan Baumbach
came to the short story later than many of his contemporaries for whom
the shorter form was an apprenticeship to the more imposing task of
making a novel. For Baumbach, the story represented another equally
important way of playing out the private/public game of the imagination.
Over the years—the earliest story in this collection is from 1972,
the latest from 2003—Baumbach’s short fiction has appeared
in such places as American Review, TriQuarterly, Iowa Review, Esquire,
Boulevard, Partisan Review, Fiction International, Antaeus, and
Mississippi Review among others. His novels include Reruns,
Babble, Chez Charlotte and Emily, Seven Wives, D-Tours, and B.
He has taught fiction writing at Princeton, NYU, Brown, Columbia, The
University of Washington, The Ohio State University, Tufts, The New
School, and Brooklyn College where he directed the MFA in fiction writing
for almost 30 years until his retirement in 2000. He has written extensively
about film and is a former chairman of the National Society of Film
Critics. This is his third collection of short fiction and his first
to bring together early and recent work in the same volume.
Praise for Baumbach’s previous collections:
“Mr. Baumbach has more voices than Willie the Whale, more accents
than the people at Berlitz, a gift for parody, a detector for cliché.”
—The New York Times
“Baumbach has a real gift for alchemizing fictional ‘autobiography’
into the pure gold of comic terror.”
—Newsweek
“Jonathan Baumbach’s Babble is a brilliant conceit, endlessly
inventive and yet my final impression was that I had read a book of
immense tenderness.”
—Maureen Howard
"This wonderful book of stories, if only because of its title,
invites comparison and then stands the test: this is major fiction.
Which is not to say that the book is not hilarious--it is, and in a
major way. Many of us who love contemporary fiction know that Jonathan
Baumbach has been doing work of the first order for years; The Life
and Times of Major Fiction, if there's any justice in the literary
world, should bring him the wider recognition he deserves."
—Russell Banks
"Baumbach's control of that slippery underground logic of the
mind-as-world turned against impotent self with all the scarifying chaotic
details painted in blood is hilarious and hilariouser until it hurts."
—Kirkus
read an excerpt | read reviews
