Kevin Sun

Donald Barthelme (Wikimedia Commons) After a friend lent me his copy of Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories  a few weeks ago, I've been hooked. I'd known about Barthelme for some time, having read "The Balloon" after David Foster Wallace mentioned it in an interview as the first piece of fiction that really "rang his cherries." That was the only piece of Barthelme's I'd read and, at the time, I was relatively unimpressed. As a long-time fan of Thomas Pynchon, I'd also known about Barthelme as a kind of American postmodernist counterweight to Pynchon's urban sprawl: Barthelme as the enigmatic purveyor of fragments and pocket-sized fictions, polished to an extreme and sharing the same compact muscularity as Hemingway's writing.  A native Texan and son of a famous architect (in whose shadow the younger Donald Barthelme would bide for years), Barthelme was enthralled by jazz at a young age. In a superb 1981 interview for The Paris R...