All three of these stories echo Donald Barthelme’s brevity, concision, and wry intelligence, his gift for memorable one-liners. Notoriously withering as his critiques could be, he would have loved all the first and last sentences here, and would have said so. I first encountered him in the 1960s via his earliest New Yorker stories. At the time, I was gathering minifictions of the length of these for an anthology to be published by Stone Wall Press in Iowa City, and at my request he provided one, lighting up that little collection. His urbane wit had led me to think of him as a city boy, so the first time I heard him read in public, he surprised me by striding to the podium in cowboy boots and reciting his fictions with the soft twang of a Texan tall-tale teller. He loved equally, as I was to learn, the inventive cool of that decade’s jazz and the thumping sentimentality of country music, high art and advertising, scrawled graffiti, and he liked to mix these things together. Though all these stories are deserving of prizes and publication, “Bats” in particular, with its commonsensical women of Northwest Ohio dreaming the winged dreams of the bats hiding upside down in their purses, perhaps best exemplifies Barthelme’s poignant whimsy, his playful collaging of artful irrealism with the commonplaces of the quotidian.
Robert Coover, Contest Judge