Description

Due to rights issues, the audio of this interview is not available online. Please contact San Diego State University, Special Collections and Archives if you wish to be granted access to the original audio. Larry McCaffery interviews Donald Barthelme in Barthelme’s home in the West Village in Manhattan. The interview begins with a description of Barthelme’s work habits, both in how he physically works and also how he conceives of his works, including an explanation of why he prefers to publish short stories rather than novels. A considerable time is spent on Barthelme’s history, how he came to be a fiction writer after working in other fields and how he eventually came to move to New York. This description includes asides from Barthelme on how art has influenced his writing. The two discuss the concept of meta-fiction, including various names for it, who writes it and whether Barthelme himself is part of that group. Barthelme gives an in-depth explanation of his relationship with The New Yorker. The interview concludes with a discussion of how film and popular culture have influenced Barthelme’s writings. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 32 to 44 of Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, University of Illinois Press, 1983.