Winner of a National Book Award, Donald Barthelme published sixteen books, including Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was a founder of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he taught for many years. He died in 1989.

Kim Herzinger is a critic, a Pushcart Prize-winning writer of fiction, and the editor of two other Donald Barthelme collections. He taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and now owns and operates Left Bank Books in New York City.

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 In this volume of unpublished and previously uncollected stories, he transforms the absurd and strange into the real in his usual epiphanic, engaging, and richly textured style.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