Moon deluxe

by Frederick Barthelme

Frederick Barthelme's stories portray with humor, detachment, precision, and deep affection that everyday world of contemporary America. Rarely has a writer, so caught the mood and tempo of our daily lives, with their shopping malls, small businesses, suburban neighbors, and busy quotidian affairs. Now Moon Deluxe brings together seventeen of these wonderful pieces, ranging in subject from the jockeying between the sexes to small town life to the vagaries of the individual-all bathed in a dry lyricism that captures the humor and dignity of our ordinary lives. Barthelme's characters inhabit a world of Subarus and suburban swimming pools, of polo shirts and quick good stands and neighborhood traffic jams. From these townscapes. Barthelme has distilled with splendid economy of means and trenchant will something of the strangeness of life, its surprising encounters and bizarre juxtapositions. While depicting the commonplace, his stories take on the atmosphere of quiet meditations, now amus