Though he published two books in the 1970s, Frederick Barthelme began to draw serious attention only with the publication of his short-story collection, Moon Deluxe, in 1983. In the seventeen stories of that book Barthelme traces the lives of men and women through the shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, and apartment complexes of postmodern America. He works with characters stunned by consumer overload and shaken by radical shifts in gender roles following the cultural revolutions in sexuality and gender relations of the late 1960s and 1970s. Throughout his subsequent novels and short stories, Barthelme's characters are searching for a new way to live that allows for meaningful relationships in an era of changed notions of masculinity and femininity. Essentially a moralist, though not of the traditional kind, Barthelme treats characters struggling to find moral footing on the slippery slope of contemporary life, where conventional values such as marriage, monogamy, fidelity...