Steven Barthelme

Steven Barthelme was born in Texas, schooled at Boston College, University of Texas, and Johns Hopkins University. He has published short stories in periodicals including the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire Online, Epoch, Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, Columbia, Swink, McSweeeney’s, Yale Review, in Pushcart and other anthologies, and in the collection And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story (1987). He has published poetry in journals including Negative Capability, New American Writing, and Southern Review. He co-wrote, with his brother Frederick, Double Down, a memoir about their family and ill-starred careers as gamblers, issued by Houghton Mifflin, 1999. His nonfiction work has been published in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Elle Decor, Texas Observer, Oxford American, Connecticut Review, and other newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies. He is currently teaching in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.


All Books

The Early Posthumous Work

Steven Barthelme

Publication Date: November 1, 2009

$17.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 1-59709-388-2

Description:

A collection of essays and occasional pieces on gambling, teaching, snakes, dogs, cars, hitchhiking, marriage and sophistication, memory and work, and a dozen other subjects. One essay announces that the two dollar bill can buy happiness and reports some resistance to this discovery. Another studies the art of life as ne’er-do-well, a sort of prequel to the “slacker” phenomenon, written and published in Austin, Texas. In yet another essay, everyone’s first name is Philip, (except the comet). Certain liberties are taken with the form.


Pieces originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, the Texas Observer, Connecticut Review, Apalachee Quarterly, and other newspapers, magazines, and anthologies.

News

PoetrySnaps! features Pamela Uschuk and her poem “Green Flame”

Pamela Uschuk is a poet, political activist, and wilderness advocate. She is also a cancer survivor, and in this week’s segment of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps!, she shares a poem that moves through the experience and endurance of chemotherapy. Uschuk says her poem Green Flame was inspired by one particular sight in nature.

Reviews

Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE Earns a Kirkus Star!

A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery. Uschuk’s poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice. This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely issues. It’s divided into four sections—“Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts”—and deals with a broad spectrum of […]

A Review of Refugee by Pamela Uschuk in the North American Review

“Since all around us refugees seem to be fleeing from something, one must ask from what they themselves flee—and that it’s hard to imagine there is anywhere left one can go to find refuge.  That is the dilemma at the core of Pamela Uschuk’s collection Refugee (Red Hen Press, 2022), a book of poems in four parts that […]

REFUGEE by Pamela Uschuk reviewed in Rain Taxi

“’So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,’ Pamela Uschuk questions in ‘A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,’ challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems […]

‘Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE – Poems of Beauty & Anger’ A Review by Joseph Ross

Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just pretty […]

Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE gets rave review in Southern Review of Books!

At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word […]

Southern Review of Books features Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE!

At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word […]