This is the New Yorker out loud from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we have a reading of a New Yorker short story from the archives or from a more recent issue.
This month we're going to hear a story by the late Donald Barthelme called I bought a little city.
First published in the New Yorker in 1974, it's an absurdist tale about God, capitalism, and urban planning.
Here's how it so I bought a little city.
It was Galveston, Texas, and told everybody that nobody had to move.
We were going to do it just gradually, very laid back, no big changes overnight.
Donald Barthelme grew up in Texas, but he spent many years in New York as an editor and writer before returning to Houston toward the end of his life.
He died in 1989 at the age of 68.
The New Yorker first published a Barthelme story in 1963, when he was 31.
129 more stories followed.
All of them were characterized by his hilarious wit, his talent for the telling, non sequitur, and his own surreal brand of verbal experimentation.
Barthelme was never a best selling author, but his work has had a huge effect on other writers, including the novelist Donald Antrim, who chose this month's story.
What I take away from it mainly is sort of gratitude if we feel like we don't really know where we're going or what's going to happen.
I think that was true also for him.
Donald Antrim and I will talk a little more about Barthelme and his story after the reading.
Now here's Donald Antrim reading.
I bought a little city by Donald Barthelme.
So I bought a little city.