A Slight Delay

Whenever an artist dies, someone’s always tempted to raid their notebooks, letters, hard drives, and anything else they can find in order to put out still more product to add to the canon. The results are highly varied, since for every unfinished masterpiece and every piece that hints at the greatness that could’ve been, from sources as varied as Douglas Adams, Jeff Buckley, or Charles Dickens, there’s a slew of stuff that was probably best left to the cutting room floor, and that’s of interest only to completists (think, for instance, of the flood of Tupac Shakur marginalia that began just as the body was cooling, and that continues unabated to this day).

Flying to America: 45 More Stories, by Donald Barthelme, lands with a meaty thump between those extremes. While it’s not the best of his output by any means–and I’ll leave the debate over the merits of specific works to others who are more inclined than myself to take it up–it’s still a worthy addition to the artist’s body of work. (more…)