Frederick Barthelme is the author of fourteen previous books of fiction. Until 2010, he directed the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi Review. He now edits New World Writing, an online magazine started in 1995.
"Very nearly alone among his peers, Frederick Barthelme has, over
the last thirty-five years, written fiction about what it actually
feels like to live in contemporary post-religious, hyper-mediated
America. And-even more of a rarity-he works hard to find a way to
somehow tolerate/celebrate, with enormous subtlety and without an
ounce of sentimentality, our bare-bones existence. In There Must Be
Some Mistake, Barthelme has distilled his brutal, crucial vision
into useable essence."--David Shields, author of How Literature
Changed My Life
"There Must Be Some Mistake is so warm and funny-here is an
appealing character with a sly wit who embraces life fully even
while knee-deep in our dreary cultural junk, with an undercurrent
of Scandinavian noir. Who but Frederick Barthelme could pull this
off? The writing is superb. I wanted the story to go on and
on."--Bobbie Ann Mason, author of The Girl in the Blue Beret
"[The reader is] spurred both to keep turning pages and linger over
them... There is much to love about this novel."--Dallas Morning
News
"Barthelme, a master of minimalist suburbia-set fiction, returns
with a buoyantly offbeat murder tale that doubles as a meditation
on everything from contemporary art to Google to mortality...
Throughout the novel, his narration provides punchy, wry commentary
on the banality of pop culture, but the tone is, ultimately,
infectiously optimistic." --Publishers Weekly
"Barthelme's writing conveys much about the oddities of
contemporary life with welcome humor."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Frederick Barthelme, that sly master of suburban surrealism and
deadpan portraitist of the confused, disengaged 21st-century man...
This is the short of vaguely Southern, vaguely menacing, extremely
funny human muck at which Barthelme excels. But beneath it all
lurks his optimistic outlook."--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Frederick Barthelme's books are a little jazzy, written in a minor
key, like tunes that fool you by seeming to be simple enough to
hum, until you realize that you can't mimic the melody. . . . There
Must Be Some Mistake is a little miracle of faith, shown to us with
an eye-opening attention to some of the glorious, perhaps even
redemptive details of our dumbed-down so-called culture."--Ann
Beattie
"In Barthelme's world, there's no choice but to laugh at the
onslaught of mundane terrors... There Must Be Some Mistake often
reads like an amusing existential satire of the detective
novel."--New York Times Book Review
"Pure joy."
--New York Times
Praise for There Must Be Some Mistake
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