Forty Stories

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, colla...