Full name: Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews

Author: Donald Barthelme Year: 1983 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Writing, Essays, Non Fiction, Art Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780679741206 0679741208

When Donald Barthelme died at the age of 58, he was perhaps the most imitated (if not emulated) practitioner of American literature. Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain unparalleled for the way they capture our national pastimes and obsessions, but most of all for the way they caputure the strangeness of life. Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; 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."   Similar books: Wormholes by John Fowles Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy On Looking by Lia Purpura In Favor of the Sensitive Man by Anais Nin At the Same Time by Susan Sontag When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson Books v. Cigarettes by George Orwell Loitering by Charles D'Ambrosio Vintage Didion by Joan Didion Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler My Ideal Bookshelf by Thessaly La Force Unpacking My Library by Leah Price The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport