The Teachings of Don B.

*A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed.
*A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem "Big Bull" de Kooning.
*A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter's wedding.
*An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God.

These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who--until his death in 1989--seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the power to blast any reader into an altered state of consciousness.

"A small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language." --The New York Times Book Review

"Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme's ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it." --Los Angeles Times