“Hush Hush speaks quietly and plainly… deceptively artful and refined.” —The Texas Observer

“Barthelme … [has a] flair for poetic one-liners paired with real emotion, and the results are breathtaking.” —Electric Literature

“Steve Barthelme’s tone is dead-right; his timing is perfect; and his philosophical stance seems about the best for being here and now … The tales are funny and touching. The telling is always deliberate, always hip, and always entirely his.”  —Mary Robison

“The stories are alive with desperate characters.”—Vanity Fair

“Profound … a refreshing contemporary story collection for readers.” —Critical Mob

“One of the few noteworthy short story collections that we’ve come across this year.”—The Huffington Post

“There is a pragmatic eloquence to Steven Barthelme’s writing, in the way his characters explain their decisions and their failures to live up to their potential … it’s often beautiful and profound.” —L.A. Review of Books

“Short, cool exercises—clever and self-referential.” —TLS

Praise for Double Down

“The whole book . . . is a wonderfully seductive performance—witty, selfaware, at once full of subtle feeling and imlpacably knowing—a triumph of style over temporary insanity … The Barthelme brothers turned losing into an art.” —A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books

“Dazzlingly canny and achingly abject.”  —Publishers Weekly

“A winning book about losing.”  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

“May be worth every penny the Barthelmes lost.” —Chicago Tribune

“Talks perceptively and sometimes brilliantly of life, death, family, hope and despair, and money as an expression of these things.” —Fay Weldon, The New York Observer

Praise for And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story

“Rich in laid-back realism, winsome fantasy, love, art, cats, and surprises. A first-rate first book.” —John Barth