Relates Matilda's adventures in the Chinese house that grew in her back yard. Collage illustrations made from nineteenth-century engravings.

In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold," in which a sculptor agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? He had a dynamic relationship with his father that influenced much of his fiction. He worked as an editor, a designer, a curator, a news reporter, and a teacher. He was at the forefront of literary Greenwich Village which saw him develop lasting friendships with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Norman Mailer. Married four times, he had a volatile private life. He died of cancer in 1989. The recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he is best remembered for the classic novels Snow White, The Dead Father, and many short stories, all of which remain in print today. Hiding Man is the first biography of Donald Barthelme, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.

The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe. As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom . . . a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it . . . Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."

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 In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd and strange into the real in his usual epiphanic, engaging, and richly textured style.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.

Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. Chief among them were Kurt Vonnegut, Jerzy Kosinski, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Although their work proved puzzling to reviewers and did not fit the conventions familiar to academic critics, these writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Hired to teach Hawthorne and other nineteenth-century figures, Klinkowitz found his deepest sympathies (and most lifelike affinities) to be with Vonnegut and company instead. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. By 1975 he was ready to write Literary Disruptions, a literary history of what he called this "post-contemporary" period. Since then he has written more than thirty books on contemporary fiction and its allied developments in cultural history, art, music, politics, and philosophy. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers—not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating, first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction.

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) is regarded as one of the most imitated and influential American fiction writers since the early 1960s. In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Jerome Klinkowitz presents both an appreciation and a comprehensive examination of the life work of this pathbreaking contemporary writer. A blend of close reading, biography, and theory, this retrospective—informed by Klinkowitz’s expert command of postmodern American fiction—contributes significantly to a new understanding of Barthelme’s work. Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme’s short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted. Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme’s work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme’s life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz’s analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme’s critical importance in the literature of our times.

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.