The characters are speakers and listeners who almost never change roles. Most of them are middle-class whites in theit thirties, drifting in and out of love. Half of the stories occur inside automobiles. As for Barthelme's style, it is made up of short, choppy sentences with few metaphors. The stories in the first collection are very short.
None are over fourteen pages.
They are closer to vignettes, notes Jim Spencer in his review, than to stories with long rambling plots. In the story, a poor cabdriver, whose son has died and who lacks an audience to speak to, tells his story to his horse. The title's origin suggests something about the voices in the Barthelme's collection. Barthelme has won several awards for his fiction, including several PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards and a Pushcart Prize in 1993. He publishes widely in literary magazines, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , Los Angeles Times , Washington Post , and elsewhere.