Not-Knowing

Donald Barthelme's premature death at the age of fifty-eight brought to an end one of the most provocative careers in the history of American literature. Groundbreaking works such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari; The Dead Father; Snow White; Great Days; Overnight to Many Distant Cities; Guilty Pleasures; and his two short-fiction collections, Forty Stories and Sixty Stories, have earned him a place among the most influential and imitated authors of the last half-century.

With his marvelously strange and darkly ironic vision of the world, his wizard satire and deadpan humor, Barthelme spoke of and for our time like no one else. He spoke of our national obsessions and weirdnesses, our unspeakable practices and unnatural acts, in what is for many the distinctive voice of postmodern America.

Not-Knowing is the second posthumous collection of Donald Barthelme's work. Not-Knowing contains Barthelme's pungent comments on writing, art, literature, film, and city life, which are, as John Barth says in his Introduction, among the permanent literary treasures of American postmodernist writing. Also here are several interviews with the author - invaluable for understanding this very private man - including two never before available.

The interviews range over the last eighteen years of Barthelme's life, and they give readers the opportunity to watch his ideas as they expand, change, and settle.