…and there were a lot of things you wanted to ask, because Gates’s intro is one of if not the best single essays ever written about DB’s work, so you figured he’d probably have done a pretty sweet job on the notes, too, but for some reason it wasn’t in the Gates-prefaced Penguin Classics Edition of Sixty Stories where it should have been, and you knew it was supposed to be posted somewhere on the Penguin website (it says so in the book) but then when you went to the website you couldn’t find it.

If this is you, friend, your troubles end today. Here. Now. I went to the Penguin site, and found the thing–years ago. It’s amazing and enlightening and it’s over 30 pages long. And I had forgotten about it until just now. Everyone should have access to these notes. Rather than try and re-figure out how I found them, I’m just going to post the .pdf myself: The David Gates footnotes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Merry Christmas, all.