This is The New Yorker Out Loud from The New Yorker Magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month, we have a reading of a New Yorker's short story from the archives or from a more

recent issue.

This month, we're going to hear a story by the late Donald Bartholomey called I Bottle

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 begins.

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 Bartholomey 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 Bartholomey 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.

Bartholomey 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.

...