Sixty Stories

by Donald Barthelme, Susan Choi (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Author Biography: Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) published twelve books, including two novels and a prize-winning children's book. He was a regular contributor to the New Yorker and taught creative writing at the University of Houston. In his career, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, among others.
David Gates is a book critic at Newsweek. He is the author of three acclaimed works of fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250420312
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/26/2026
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Donald Barthelme was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, winner of a National Book Award, a director of PEN and the Authors Guild, and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His sixteen books–including Snow White, The Dead Father, and City Life–substantially redefined American short fiction for our time.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Barthelme can focus our feeling into a bright point that can raise a blister. These 60 stories show him inventing at a fever pitch." —The Washington Post

"Donald Barthelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Hemingway and O' Hara did in theirs." —The New York Times

"The delight he offers to readers is beyond question, his originality is unmatched." —Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

"Donald Bathelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Henningway and O'Hara did in theirs. 60 Stories is a whole earth catalog of life in our time." -- The New York Times

Anatole Broyard

"If you read straight through these stories you're bound to be struck by the volume's cohesiveness. Donald Bathelme's writing is from the outset firm and sure, entirely his own. He experiments as freely nowadays as he did when younger, and his experiments reaveal a rare exhuberance, an unfaiing joy in words and possibilities." -- Detroit News

Anne Tyler

"Bathalme can focu our feeling into a bright point that can raise a blister. These 60 stories show him inventing at full pitch." -- Washington Post

Guy Davenport

"Barthelme can focus our feeling into a bright point that can raise a blister. These 60 stories show him inventing at a fever pitch." —The Washington Post

"Donald Barthelme may have influenced the short story in his time as much as Hemingway and O' Hara did in theirs." —The New York Times

"The delight he offers to readers is beyond question, his originality is unmatched." —Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher