The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself-even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom...a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it...Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
"The funniest and most effective things in The Dead Father are accomplished by language, by the writing itself . . . Essential reading."
Jerome Klinkowitz, The New Republic
"Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom, . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."
