Donald Barthelme is a winner of the National Book Award and is the author of over seventeen books, including Flying to America, City Life (one of Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year), and Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was a founder of the renowned University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he taught for many years. He died in 1989. Kim Herzinger is a critic who writes on minimalism and other contemporary literary phenomena, a Pushcart Prize–winning writer of fiction, and the editor of two other Donald Barthelme collections, Not–Knowing and The Teachings of Don B. He taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and now owns and operates Left Bank Books in New York City."