It was in my late teens that I fell for Donald Barthelme. No passing adolescent fancy this, but a palpitating obsession of the first water. In his essay The Beards, Jonathan Lethem writes of Talking Heads that “[at] the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head”. In 1993 I felt much the same way about Forty Stories, the first Barthelme collection I owned. That book and its predecessor Sixty Stories were Barthelme’s self-selected “best-ofs”, their contents culled from nine story collections and work first published in magazines such as the New Yorker and Esquire. His fiction resulted in more letters of complaint being sent to the former publication than any other writer, a predictable result of its audacity. His postmodernist aesthetic, however, is not of the sort that revels in being problematic for its own sake. “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” he wrote in his 1987 essay Not-Knowing, ‘but because it wishes to be art.”
more from The Guardian here.