Donald Barthelme

This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence. With an introduction by Dave Eggers.

Witty, surreal, and endlessly inventive, Forty Stories is Barthelme at his finest--dismantling convention, bending language, and turning fiction into pure mischief. Donald Barthelme is a master of the unexpected, a writer who bends fiction into strange and exhilarating shapes. In Forty Stories, the companion to Sixty Stories, he delivers a dazzling collection of tales--each one a collision of wit, absurdity, and sharp social insight. With a signature postmodern style that blends pastiche, collage, and metafiction, Barthelme reinvents storytelling at every turn. He takes on subjects as varied as Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage, divorce, and armadillos, but his true fascination lies in language itself--how it twists, contradicts, and reveals the absurdity of contemporary life. Packed with irony, surreal imagery, and deadpan humor, these stories probe authority, relationships, and existential anxieties, all while keeping the reader deliciously off-balance. At once playful and profound, fragmented yet deeply resonant, Forty Stories is a brilliant showcase of Barthelme's ability to subvert expectations and transform the ordinary into something extraordinary. For readers who crave fiction that defies convention, this collection is an invitation to experience storytelling at its most fearless.

Sixty Stories brings together Barthelme's most famous works and hidden gems--a dazzling, subversive collection where language bends, reality warps, and the absurd reigns supreme. With these subversive, razor-sharp stories, Donald Barthelme dismantles the familiar and rearranges it into something dazzlingly strange. Sixty Stories is a literary fun house where language is bent, meaning is slippery, and the absurd is never far from the truth. Here, the ordinary mutates into the uncanny--an enormous balloon hovers over the city, its purpose debated by those below; a classroom lesson spirals into something darker and more profound; two men locked in a Cold War bunker teeter on the edge of madness. Elsewhere, a friend struggles to coax the Phantom of the Opera out of his shadowy refuge, and an entire town is made up of nothing but churches. Barthelme moves effortlessly between deadpan satire, dream logic, and moments of startling beauty, crafting stories that are as unsettling as they are irresistible. Whether you're encountering his work for the first time or returning for another descent into his linguistic labyrinth, Sixty Stories is a testament to a writer who saw the world askew--and showed us how thrilling that could be.

The definitive collection of a twentieth-century master of the short story, whose unforgettable inventions revolutionized the form The short stories of Donald Barthelme, revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention and pathos that have dazzled and delighted readers since the 1960s. Here, for the first time, these essential stories are preserved as they were published in Barthelme's original collections, beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), a book that made a generation of readers sit up and take notice. Collected Stories also includes the work that appeared for the first time in Barthelme's two retrospective anthologies, Sixty and Forty, as well as a selection of uncollected stories. Discover, in this comprehensive gathering, Barthelme's unique approach to fiction, his upside-down worlds that are nonetheless grounded in fundamental human truths, his scrambled visions of history that yield unexpected insights, and his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, which was for him the central principle of all art in the twentieth century. Engage with sophisticated works of fiction that, often in just the space of a few pages, wrest profundities out of what might first seem merely ephemeral, even trivial. And experience, along with Barthelme's imaginative and frequently subversive ideas, the pleasures of a consummate stylist whose sentences are worth marveling at and savoring. Introduced with a sharp and discerning essay by editor Charles McGrath and annotation that clarifies Barthelme's freewheeling, wide-ranging allusions, the landmark volume is a desert-island edition for fans and the ideal introduction to new readers eager to find out why, as Dave Eggers writes, Barthelme's every sentence ... makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all of my synapses and connects them in new ways.

The wildly varied essays in "Not-Knowing" combine to form a posthumous manifesto of one of America s masters of literary experiment. Here are Barthelme s thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two previously unpublished; and meditations on everything from "Superman III" to the art of rendering Melancholy Baby on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters. "

In The King, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, Donald Barthelme moves the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table to the cruelty of the Second World War. Dunkirk has fallen, Europe is at the breaking point, Ezra Pound and Lord Haw-Haw are poisoning the radio waves, Mordred has fled to Nazi Germany, and King Arthur and his worshipful Knights are deep in the fighting. When the Holy Grail presents itself--which is, in this version, the atomic bomb, "a superweapon if you will, with which we can chastise and thwart the enemy"--they must decide whether to hew to their knightly ways or adopt a modern ruthlessness. Barthelme makes brilliant comic use of anachronism to show that war is center stage in the theater of human absurdity and cruelty. But Arthur, in deciding to decline the power of the Grail, announces his unwillingness to go along: "It's not the way we wage war. The essence of our calling is right behavior, and this false Grail is not a knightly weapon."

This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.

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."

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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.