Flying to America

Flying to America, first published in 2007, presents all of Barthelme’s previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction. For both devotees and those new to Barthelme’s playful irreverence, erudition, and unmatched imagination, this unprecedented survey offers 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, but not the insipidly alarming with winks of hope. We'd have to wait for George Saunders for that. With Barthelme, strange may come both in the tale and in the form, but it appears, Barthelme has tooled the absurd so that is rings true. Barthelme’s work conveys something of “the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”