Sun Deluxe by Frederick Barthelme

Sun Deluxe: New and Collected Stories brings together a decades-arcing assemblage of work, pairing new and previously unpublished pieces with some of Frederick Barthelme’s classic stories previously published in some of America’s most prestigious magazine and journals. 

Known for his unorthodox structure, minimalistic style, and sharp emotional insight, readers will find themselves immersed in his world of condos, truck-stop diners, and characters caught in the delicate act of revising their expectations, misreading one another, and figuring things out, again. This career-spanning collection creates a quietly luminous portrait of American life, then and now, through small and timeless absurdities. 

Sun Deluxe stands out as an extensive assortment, capturing Barthelme at his most resonant and enduring, with stories that define modern life with a sharpness that stings yet offers a gentle clarity in an unapologetic, honest manner. 

Author

Frederick Barthelme studied fiction with John Barth at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, from which he received his Master of Arts degree. From 1977 to 2010 he taught fiction writing and directed the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He won numerous awards including individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and diverse grants and awards as editor of Mississippi Review and Mississippi Review Online, which he founded and edited. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction and has been published in GQ, Fiction, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank Magazine, The Southern Review, the Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into nine languages. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, co-authored with his brother Steven, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded to his collection, The Law of Averages. His novel Elroy Nights was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction and is presently editor and publisher of the online literary publication New World Writing (previously Blip Magazine).

Praise

“Frederick Barthelme’s sentences imbue seemingly small moments with an enormous significance that escapes us in daily life. Lucid surfaces; an exacting attention to objects, environments, and relationships; and a kind of narrative restraint cause emotion to accumulate in a potent, unsuspecting way. The effect is strange and unmistakable. After I read him, I see the world through his eyes. He is simply a master of the short story form, and Sun Deluxe is a collection ‘in which ordinary life is made fun of and made mysterious and beautiful at the same time.’”—Jordan Castro, author of Muscle Man

“[A]n extended meditation on the textures of ordinary existence in a culture defined by surfaces. Barthelme’s subtle humor is a lingering presence, often emerging from incongruity or understatement . . . a mosaic of lives that feel suspended between irony and sincerity, where meaning flickers but never fully settles. A quiet, unsettling reflection of modern life.”—Booklist