When Donald Barthelme died at the age of 54, he was perhaps the most imitated (if not emulated) practitioner of American literature. Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain unparalleled for the way they capture our national pastimes and obsessions, but most of all for the way they caputure the strangeness of life.
Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.'" -Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction Sixty-three rare or previously uncollected works by a master of the American short story form *A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. *A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem "Big Bull" de Kooning. *A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter's wedding. *An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who-until his death in 1989-seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the power to blast any reader into an altered state of consciousness. "A small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language." -The New York Times Book Review "Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme's ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it." -Los Angeles Times

Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the 20th century. In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd and strange into the real in his usual epiphanic, engaging, and richly textured style. The stories delve further into themes that often interested Barthelme: the perils of the unfulfilled existence; the relationships between politics, art, sex, and life; and the importance of continuing to ask questions even though we are unable to learn the answers. This collection will delight both old fans and new readers.