Attention Must Be Paid

Donald Barthelme died of cancer in 1989, and it's taken this long to get all his stories back in print. He was a master American writer, admired by peers and critics. His dense, witty postmodernism—a label of which he was suspicious—flourished not in all-head-no-bread literary journals, but in The New Yorker, which published 128 of his 145 stories. But in the '70s, a new realism was coming into favor, exemplified by the plain-spoken Raymond Carver. When Barthelme did use conventional narrative, he was mostly funning, and readers got impatient with his many voices—the lingo of typesetters, hillbillies or theologians—his appropriations from T. S. Eliot or psychiatric texts, his references to Albinoni or Muddy Waters.

All of Barthelme's original collections—"Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts," "Come Back, Dr. Caligari," etc., are out of print, but Penguin continues to publish the omnibus volumes "60 Stories" and "40 Stories." Now Shoemaker & Hoard offers "Flying to America," edited by writer and critic Kim Herzinger, Barthelme's great posthumous champion. (He's also edited "The Teachings of Don B.," a collection of parodies and topical satires, and a volume of essays, reviews and interviews.) This book has 45 more stories, including unpublished rarities. Down to seeds and stems? Not at all. "The Piano Player"—in which the instrument strikes its owner dead—was once widely taught; "Florence Green Is 81" is an affectionate portrait and a meditation on mortality. The studiously inane story "The Question Party" has this note at the end: "This piece is an objet trouv?. It was originally published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1850 … I have cut it and added some three dozen lines."

Another champion, the new-generation icon Dave Eggers, has written an admiring introduction to "40 Stories." And he's given over a separately bound half of the current issue of McSweeney's, his hardcover quarterly, to a tribute called "Come Back, Donald Barthelme," with two stories from the new volume, and reflections by friends, ex-students and fans: Ann Beattie, Robert Coover, Oscar Hijuelos, Grace Paley, George Saunders. It was conceived and assembled by a newer-generation writer, Justin Taylor, who began it at 23, when getting his M.F.A. at Manhattan's New School. (Disclosure: Taylor studied with me, and he's included a piece of mine.) "Barthelme's mistake was to pass away while both unfashionable and middle-aged," says Taylor, now 25. "If he were alive today, he'd be ranked with guys like Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon."

Taylor had been collecting Barthelme anecdotes, then got an introduction to Eggers, to whom he pitched it as an oral history for McSweeney's books. Eggers offered him a special section of the magazine. "I started with people who I knew had known Barthelme," Taylor says, "and then followed their leads in terms of whom to approach next. People were eager to rally to the cause." Grace Paley—who died this fall—wrote that there are now "brilliant young people laboriously imitating him … Young people listen, or ought to, as they begin their work, for some breathtaking voice that will help them open their own throats." Finally, that voice is a full chorus again.