The Brothers

After Del Tribute almost sleeps with his brother's sexually edgy wife, The Brothers sets out to trace and detail the intricate pattern of consequences of this near indiscretion. Del and Bud, two brothers whose middle–aged adolescent antics have a way of messing up each other's lives, both confront the bittersweet comfort of having too many choices. In a remarkable performance that extends the territory of Barthelme's fiction, the love and desire of these brothers is laid open, explored, and experienced.

Frederick Barthelme was a founding member, with Mayo Thompson, of the art/noise/psychedelic rock band Red Krayola, and a painter and conceptual artist in Houston and New York in the late 1960s. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Fiction, Epoch, GQ, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank, The Southern Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. The memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded his retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages and his novel Elroy Nights, which was also one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2009 he published Waveland, a novel set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast a year after Katrina. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.