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Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The New Yorker, July 31, 1965. The story can also be found in the anthologies 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1966), edited by Judith Merril, The War Book (1969) edited by James Sallis and The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000), edited by Jonathan Lethem.

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.

An American short story writer and novelist acclaimed for his playful, postmodern style of short fiction, Barthelme's first novel, Snow White, is a countercultural, experimental reconstruction of the Disney version of the traditional fairytale.

In Barthelme's modern day world, Snow White is a seductive woman waiting for her prince to return to New York. Pushing the bounds of fiction and form, Barthelme subverts the classic tale, prompting The New York Times to call him "a splendid practitioner at the peak of his power" and inspiring a new generation of authors including Charles Baxter, Dave Eggers, and David Gates.

The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself--even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal. In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe.

As Donald Antrim writes in his introduction, "Reading The Dead Father, one has the sense that its author enjoys an almost complete artistic freedom... a permission to reshape, misrepresent, or even ignore the world as we find it... Laughing along with its author, we escape anxiety and feel alive."