On the Way to My Father's Funeral: New & Selected Stories

by Jonathan Baumbach

Here are thirteen new stories and Baumbach's selected, which have appeared in such diverse compilations as Full A Literary Anthology of Basketball, On the Great American Stories About Therapy, The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction, Byrne's Book of Great Pool Stories, Show Me a Great Contemporary Stories about Sports, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories--collected together for the first time. Whether they star a mild-mannered psychologist with a fondness for female patients or a King Kong-like giant ape with a human-sized penis or a female patient with a fondness for mild-mannered psychologists, Baumbach consistently reinvents traditional character-type and the traditional story.

Genres: Short Stories

410 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. Married Annette Grant (fourth wife) on Dec. 18, 2004. Former wives: Naomi Miller, Elinor Berkman, Georgia Brown. Children: David, Nina, Noah and Nico. A.B (English) Brooklyn College, MFA (Playwriting) Columbia University, Ph.D (English and American Lit), Stanford University. Fellowships include Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Merrill. Invented in 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America; reinvented in 1988 as FC2. An unintentionally well-kept secret among contemporary American novelists. Author of 14 books of fiction

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the past thirty years, Jonathan Baumbach has been a metafictionist with a lower case m. In numerous amusing ways he calls attention to the fiction he is creating - as in "The Adventures of King Dong" when a primary character has a degree in Anthropomorphology - but his means are always subtle. Baumbach is not out to break narrative flow or make large, disruptive statements about the falseness of fiction. Rather, he is content to tell a good story, which he infallibly does, with a sly wink, wink, nudge to let us know he knows this is merely a game of pretend we're playing together. A potential problem with metafiction is that it can easily devolve a story into an outline sketch, the writer too caught up in clever facades to worry about things like character development or even multi-dimensional settings. Baumbach largely sidesteps this pitfall, due mainly to his painterly attention to physical detail and his acute interest in human psychology. In fact, he loves to cast both psychologists and painters as tragic heroes in his stories (he also loves writing about marital infidelity and filmmaking). One of the founders of the groundbreaking independent press, FC2, Baumbach has long been a pivotal, albeit unappreciated, figure in American experimental fiction. Low Fidelity Press has done his work and his readers a great service by collecting so many of
Baumbach's hard-to-find stories in this one intelligently organized collection

[Alexis]

The Best Novels You’ve Never Read
Sixty-one critics reveal their favorite underrated book of the past ten years.

ON THE WAY TO MY FATHER’S FUNERAL
By Jonathan Baumbach
He came of age with more widely known writers like Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. It’s a terrible mistake that his name isn’t often mentioned along with theirs.
—Michael Cunningham

DOMINION
By Calvin Baker
Less jaded than Colson Whitehead, less kitschy than Toni Morrison, Calvin Baker is my favorite contemporary African-American novelist, and Dominion is his best book yet.
—Dale Peck

THE DEBT TO PLEASURE
By John Lanchester
Pure wicked literary pleasure. Well received when published, but not nearly as well read as deserved. Ghostly progenitor: Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
—Ron Rosenbaum

MORTALS
By Norman Rush
Rush’s second best book (after Mating) is better than almost anyone else’s best book.
—Benjamin Kunkel

EXPERIENCE
By Martin Amis
The cleverest and funniest and most moving memoir I’ve ever read, and each time I reread it I’m simply drunk with pleasure.
—Jim Holt

MARIETTE IN ECSTASY
By Ron Hansen
A perfect book. So compelling, and curious, and beautifully written, it reads like a prayer.
—Elissa Schappell

A RELATIVE STRANGER
By Charles Baxter
His mastery of forms of prose fiction and the embodiment in his work of virtually every aspect of the America that we live in are unparalleled.
—Lawrence Joseph, The Nation

THE EXTRA MAN
By Jonathan Ames
An unholy combination of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, sexual perversion, and lifestyle tips. Needless to say, wickedly funny.
—Michael Agger, Slate

STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN
By Kelly Link
A book that could be shelved under several genres—horror, fantasy, literary fiction—it suffers from the limited ways in which we think about literature.
—David Orr, Times Book Review

WHAT SALMON KNOW
By Elwood Reid
Short stories that keep the form’s most solemn promises.
—Walter Kirn

MEMORIES OF MY FATHER WATCHING TV
By Curtis White
Fit to stand with White Noise as a book about the great national pastime.
—Keith Gessen, n+1

THE WIFE
By Meg Wolitzer
Funnier than Roth, Bellow, Amis— all of whom Wolitzer satirizes in this brilliant, hilarious novel.
—Ruth Davis Konigsberg, the New York Observer

DO EVERYTHING IN THE DARK
By Gary Indiana
With scrupulously intense sentences—pitch-perfect, pitch-dark—Indiana conjures a hugely sad New York novel that feels at once state-of-the-art and stunningly ancient.
—Ed Park, The Believer

LAST NIGHT
By James Salter
Should have been a best seller, and over its long lifetime probably will be. So why not now?
—Jason Epstein

BANISHING VERONA
By Margot Livesey
Scary, funny plots, some of the creepiest villains in recent memory, and language both gorgeous and tart.
—Erin McGraw, Raleigh News & Observer

MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS
By Madison Smartt Bell
An achievement unparalleled in American letters since the time of Dos Passos. Disturbing in many parts, it is also a hell of a fun read.
—David Hellman

THE ROAD HOME
By Jim Harrison
Harrison’s most mature work, expressing wonder at human behavior while displaying both understanding and gracious good humor.
—Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

NICE BIG AMERICAN BABY
By Judy Budnitz
Gorgeously written, bafflingly odd tales that you don’t read as much as absorb. These are fairy tales for our dark times, and they enchant even as they disturb.
—Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Baumbach's stories contain unfathomable dealings and coincidences that would leave a reader in confusion were it not for the certainty, the confidence of his prose. Again and again, in his stories, he weaves strands apart and together, with utter control and sureness. His stories are remarkably free of cliché; except when in subverting a cliché, he can accomplish a great advancement in the plot, in the characters, or, with much of the humor in his stories, for the simple love of playing with the language.

We get deadpan responses to blatant emotional provocations; reactions different from what a reader expects, yet entirely consistent with characters as we come to better know them, their subtle shifts and manipulations; characters motivations are there for us to see, but Jonathan hides them beautifully from the other participants in the story, so that the reckoning is total, their resolution final and thorough.

Characters in Jonathan Baumbach's stories confront over and over the difference between who they think they are, and who, through the magnificent prose, we know, and other characters suspect them to be. There comes a time in these stories where characters, confronted with a choice, make, not the “wrong” choice, but the most interesting one, one that keeps the reader wanting more, and invariably, receiving more than they could've reasonably wished for.