{
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  "title": "The Glass Mountain",
  "subtitle": null,
  "slug": "the-glass-mountain",
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/donald-barthelme/the-glass-mountain",
  "json": "https://www.bookquiver.com/donald-barthelme/the-glass-mountain.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/donald-barthelme/the-glass-mountain.md",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Donald Barthelme",
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  "language": "en_GB",
  "original_title": null,
  "original_language": null,
  "first_published": "2014-03-06",
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      "heading": "Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general"
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  "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/donald-barthelme/the-glass-mountain_978-07-1819-626-4-d989df9a.webp?v=2026-10-17%2002%3A48%3A30",
  "description": "A glass mountain sits in the middle of a city and at the top sits a 'beautiful, enchanted symbol'. Seeking to disenchant it, the narrator must climb the mountain. Confronted by the jeers of acquaintances, the bodies of previous climbers and the claws of a guarding eagle he, slowly, begins to ascend. In true postmodernist form, subject and purpose collide as Donald Barthelme uses one-hundred fragmented statements to destabilise a symbol of his own - literature's conventional forms and practices. With a quest, a princess and an array of knights, Barthelme subverts that most traditional of genres, the fairy-tale; irony, absurdity, and playful self-reflexivity are the champions of this short story.",
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    {
      "title": "The Glass Mountain",
      "subtitle": null,
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/donald-barthelme/the-glass-mountain/9780718196264",
      "publisher": "Penguin",
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      "isbn": "978-07-1819-626-4",
      "pages": null,
      "published": "2014-03-06",
      "language": "en_GB",
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