Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Donald Barthelme. Bantam Books, first edition, first printing (1969). No cover artist credited. 165 pages.
While there is no artist credited for the frenetic, Boschian cover of this Bantam edition of Unspeakable Practces, it is likely the work of Steele Savage — compare it in particular with Savage’s cover for Ballantine’s 1969 edition of John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar.
Barthelme’s second collection of short stories (most of which first ran in The New Yorker) is larded with some of the postmodernist’s greatest hits: “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, “Game,” “See the Moon?”….It would be an ideal starting point for Barthelme if Sixty Stories and Forty Stories didn’t already exist. I wrote about many of the stories collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts a few years ago when I revisited Sixty Stories.
And if you want to get into Barthelme but aren’t sure of where to start, you could do far worse than to hear him read his classic, “The Indian Uprising”:
Biblioklept 
Good eye on the Steele Savage guess — I echo that. I wish we could find actual evidence as wow, what a cover.
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thank you for mass market monday
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A wild cover! Feels like a fitting design for a book of Barthelme’s stories. I don’t believe I’ve read this book, but I’ve read — and very much enjoyed — “The Balloon” and “Game.”
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