Back Cover:

Experimentation with the "absurd," both in theme and technique, is by no means a totally new development in literature, especially for those readers familiar with the works of Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Genêt, and Robbe-Grillet. Like these writers, Mr. Barthelme satirizes and mimics most of the clichés of our popular culture, and, through the predicaments of his characters, makes the reader ask "Why?" Yet these predicaments, although bizarre, inane, and usually surrealistic, do not necessarily contain the morose connotations of most writers of the absurd. For example, in one tale the narrator is thirty-five years old, six feet tall, with the logic and reasoning of an adult. He is in the sixth grade, where Miss Mandible, his teacher, is frustrated in her desires to have an affair with him because, officially, he is a child!

These imaginative stories of dark humor, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, are to be interpreted on many levels, and offer refreshing and thoroughly exciting reading.

". . .at long last, for better or for worse, the Absurd has in these pages been equated precisely with the Goofy. Hardly one of the 14 stories ends without a wry twist proclaiming that even its metaphysical protest has been all in fun." -- The New York Times

". . . Barthelme manages to evoke the kind of thoughtful laughter he is looking for, the kind of astonishment that is a stimulant. He has created certain effects that seem to be new in the literature of the absurd, and this gives him importance as an experimentalist." -- Granville Hicks, Saturday Review

Donald Barthelme is a thirty-two-year-old Texan now living in New York City. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, a magazine editor, and a museum director, and served in the Army in Korea and Japan. He is currently managing editor of the art-literary review, Location, and is at work on a novel. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Contact, New World Writing, Harpers Bazaar, and other magazines.