The wildly varied essays in Not-Knowing combine to form a posthumous manifesto of one of America's masters of literary experiment. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two previously unpublished; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele.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."

For both devotees and those new to Barthelme's playful irreverence, erudition, and unmatched imagination, this unprecedented survey offers up a rare and wonderful treat.

One of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century, Donald Barthelme wrote novels, short stories, parodies, plays, satires, fables, and essays that captured the good, the bad, but most of all the strange of America. With Barthelme, strange may come both in the tale and in the form--it may surface in a riotous crowd tamed by saxophones, or in a story accompanied by stage directions--but...

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...