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by: Donald Barthelme
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780142437810
ISBN: 0142437816
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: January 25, 2005
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Release Date: January 25, 2005
Sales Rank: 216366
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
William H. Gass has written of Donald Barthelme that “he has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction.” In Forty Stories, the companion volume to Sixty Stories, we encounter a dazzling array of subjects: Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage and divorce, armadillos, and other unique Barthelmean flights of fancy. These pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces tangle with the ludicrous, pose questions that remain unresolved, and challenge familiar bits of language heretofore unexamined. Forty Stories demonstrates Barthelme’s unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore.
Amazon.com:
Like the title says, here are 40 short works culled from across Barthelme's career. Along with the similarly titled 60 Stories, this book provides one of the best samplings currently in print of Barthelme's unrivaled humor, his melancholy, the poetry of his line, and his considerable intellect. It includes pieces such as the famous 'Sentence,' (a single, several-page-long, unfinished sentence), 'The Flight of Pigeons From the Palace,' one of the writer's illustrated stories, and 'Overnight To Many Distant Cities.'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - angus kennedy
While very challenging and insightful, I found many of the stories to be superficially "cute" and a little self-indulgent. Not as satisfying as I thought it would be.
Rating:  - son of a son of a son........
The Marx brothers and origami have an affair. They name the bastard Donald barthelme.
Rating: - The Perfect Motivation
As an aspiring writer, these stories by Barthelme give me hope that experimental literature still thrives in this sound byte-, laugh track-, talking head-prompted, fast-paced MTV culture of ours. For the most part, the stories take a level of patients foreign to the average reader, but are so creative, so clever, so breathtaking (to sound cliché)--and let's not forget: short (most average 6ish pages)--and so on that before you even have a chance to let one story sink in, you're already well into ... Read More
Rating: - Marvelous collection by one of America's most unique writers
Donald Barthelme is one of the very few masters of the short short story. The only others that come to mind are Saki, Borges, and Franz Kakfa. Few of the stories in this collection extend past three pages. All are marked by the same virtues evident throughout the collection: surreality, inventiveness, enormous humor, a sensitivity to our collective culture. Some have commented on the collection being uneven. Perhaps. But the stories are quite diverse, and I suspect that what some find uneven is actually ... Read More
Rating: - A good, if a bit uneven, collection
This collection has many great short stories within it. Often, within this book, Barthelme shows himself to be an extremely creative and insightful writer. "Jaws" is a good example of this. Basically, it's a story about how people deal with their dissatisfaction in relationship; how lovers cope with significant others' inevitable inability to meet all their (the lovers') expectations. It follows a workers at a local A & P while he mediates the relationship of two customers (who are married to each ... Read More
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