if it is not in the spirit of a rather-too-tedious request for information, could one of you map out the corpus of donald barthelme for me?

In July 1986 the New Yorker published Donald Barthelme's "More Zero; A Novel of Los Anomies" which was a spoof of "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis: pic.twitter.com/snok1HRcJa

— Brian Davey (@b_davey) November 8, 2022

This looks better to me than most Barthelme looks to me.

Word.

from the Forgotten Novelists thread:

Barthelme's "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning" was a revelation to teen me: each paragraph was like, a scene, man, but of what and from what it was up to me to decide, also how much it mattered, since I also had the impression of index cards as playing cards. Wrote something like that, deliberately on my teen level, about a girl I knew, to an extent.
Dave Hickey wrote about DB's Come Back, Dr. Caligari as a crucial breakthrough for his own writing---not, alas, his fiction, which he was already fleeing (this is the afterword to his remarkable Prior Convictions: Stories From The Sixties).
So now I want to read that one, at least. Some of the later DB stories I came across seemed like scenic routes to Dad jokes, but will keep an eye out for whatever.
― dow, Saturday, 1 October 2022

"RKSFD" that should be

If you go looking for issues, also check for the modified title:

It was initially called New American Review, published and distributed as a paperback book by the New American Library, and while it continued publication at Simon & Schuster, but shortened its name to American Review when it moved to Bantam Books in 1973.

Lots of good stuff!