Barthelme

Daugherty has also been around the block; he is the author of biographies of Joan Didion, Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme.

Nesbit had a serious relationship with the author Donald Barthelme before she married Gilman, and one day, Barthelme telegrammed her from Europe.

He was the smirking successor of Vonnegut and Barthelme, a big-idea humorist with some postmodern acrobatics tossed in.

Can we compare him to gumbo, his style a stew of influences encompassing such unlikely pairings as William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer and Grace Paley, William Trevor and Donald Barthelme?

She’s less playful than the minimalist Barthelme, and less liquidly philosophical than Iris Murdoch.