What would The New Yorker have done without Donald Barthelme? And what would Donald Barthelme have done without The New Yorker?

These are far from idle questions, for rarely in our time have the careers of a celebrated fiction writer and a leading magazine represented so productive an example of what biologists call mutualism, with each partner serving a significant need of the other. Though it might seem incomprehensible to young readers who know him only for his slight valedictory novel, The King (which he completed shortly before his death in 1989), the introduction of Barthelme’s barbed, idiosyncratic jeux d’esprit into the pages of The New Yorker a generation ago did the same thing for the magazine’s fiction department that the introduction of guitar music into the liturgy did for the Roman Catholic Church at about the same time: namely,...

 

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