Books by Donald Barthelme
Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)
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.
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Forty Stories (Penguin Classics)
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.
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.
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The Dead Father (FSG Classics)
by Donald Barthelme, Donald Antrim
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."
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Snow White
by Wilhelm Grimm, Brothers Grimm, Donald Barthelme, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, Jane Ray
THE REISSUE OF the classic Grimm tale of a beautiful young girl with skin as white as snow, lips and cheeks as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony is breathtakingly realized by acclaimed artist Charles Santore in this lush, lovely picture book.
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Snow White
by Wilhelm Grimm, Brothers Grimm, Donald Barthelme, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, Jane Ray
In exquisite three-dimensional scenes, Jane Ray retells and illuminates the story of Snow White, creating a gift book worthy of a fairy tale.
Once there was a beautiful girl with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as dark as the winter branches. In six intricate spreads, delicate paper layers let children peer in the palace window at the wicked queen with her mirror, watch Snow White run to the house of the seven dwarves, and gaze as the prince wakes her in her coffin. As the familiar text unfolds on flaps evoking stage curtains, the scenes play out in dioramas of rare depth and beauty.
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Snow White
by Wilhelm Grimm, Brothers Grimm, Donald Barthelme, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, Jane Ray
“Eccentric, dazzling…the literary conversation piece of the year.” –San Francisco Chronicle
An American short story writer and novelist acclaimed for his playful, postmodern style of short fiction, Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, is a countercultural, experimental reconstruction of the Disney version of the traditional fairytale.
In Barthelme’s modern day world, Snow White is a seductive woman waiting for her prince to return to New York. Pushing the bounds of fiction and form, Barthelme subverts the classic tale, prompting The New York Times to call him “a splendid practitioner at the peak of his power” and inspiring a new generation of authors including Charles Baxter, Dave Eggers, and David Gates.
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Snow White
by Wilhelm Grimm, Brothers Grimm, Donald Barthelme, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, Jane Ray
The beloved Brothers Grimm fairy tale about the princess who is the fairest of them all, illustrated by the legendary European artist Bernadette Watts.
When the Queen’s magic mirror claims that Snow White is the most beautiful, the Queen plots to have the young girl killed. Snow White escapes into the forest and finds a new home, until her stepmother creates cruel new ways to destroy her. Can the kindness of a passing stranger save her? Bernadette Watts’ beautiful pastel illustrations bring both a softness and new life to this beloved Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
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Paradise (American Literature)
"No other word for it: a charming book." Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
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Flying to America: 45 More Stories
A volume of the National Book Award–winning author’s uncollected―and three previously unpublished―short stories “arrives like a wondrous jewel unearthed” (Literary Journal).
Donald Barthelme is widely recognized as one of the most influential and inventive writers of the 20th century. In this volume of unpublished or previously uncollected stories, he displays his keen eye for the absurd as well as his uniquely engaging, epiphanic, and richly textured style. The stories collected here delve into the themes that most fascinated Barthelme: the perils of the unfulfilled existence; the relationships between politics, art, sex, and life; and the importance of continuing to ask questions even though we are unable to learn the answers.
Spanning Barthelme’s career, this posthumous collection includes his first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report,” which appeared in 1959 under a pseudonym, as well as his last, “Tickets,” published in The New Yorker shortly before he died in 1989. From this broad scope, “it is possible . . . to trace the author’s development from an early postmodern baroque . . . to the fragmentary, almost minimalist style of his late-’60s and early-’70s prime” (Los Angeles Times).
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Flying to America: 45 More Stories
Donald Barthelme was one of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century. Through his unique, richly textured, and brilliantly realized novels, stories, parodies, satires, fables, and essays, Barthelme redefined a generation of American letters. To John Hawkes, he was one of our greatest of all comic writers.” Robert Coover called him one of our great citizens of contemporary world letters.” And to Thomas Pynchon, who coined the term Barthelismo, his work conveyed something of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”
This collection presents all of Barthelme's previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, as well as work not published in his two compendium editions, Sixty Storiesand Forty Stories. Highlights of Flying to America include three unpublished stories, Among the Beanwoods,” Heather,” and Pandemonium”; fourteen stories never before available in book form-from his first published story, Pages from the Annual Report” (1959), to his last, Tickets” (1989); and the long out-of-print Sam's Bar, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast. With Flying to America, fans and new readers alike have the huge pleasure of a new collection from one of America's great literary masters.
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Flying to America: 45 More Stories
"Barthleme may have been radical in his time, but he’s perfectly suited to our own." ―Houston Chronicle
One of the most influential and inventive writers of the twentieth century, Donald Barthelme wrote novels, short stories, parodies, plays, satires, fables, and essays that captured the good, the bad, but most of all the strange of America. With Barthelme, strange may come both in the tale and in the form, but however it appears, Barthelme has tooled the absurd so that is rings true. As observed by Thomas Pynchon (who coined the term Barthelmismo), Barthelme’s work conveys something of “the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”
Flying to America, first published in 2007, presents all of Barthelme’s previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction. For both devotees and those new to Barthelme’s playful irreverence, erudition, and unmatched imagination, this unprecedented survey offers up a rare and wonderful treat.
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Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories (LOA #343) (Library of America, 343)
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."
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The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme
A Batman episode slowed to soap-opera speed; a game of baseball played by T. S. Eliot and Willem de Kooning; an illustrated account of a scientific quest for God. These imaginative riffs on reality could only have been generated by the brilliant bad boy of American letters, Donald Barthelme. Here, 63 rare short works by Barthelme satires and gables, plays for stage and radio, and collages have been assembled in a single volume. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is sure to alter any reader’s consciousness.
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Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews
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.”
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The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays
"Barthelme . . . happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.'" ―Thomas Pynchon, from the Introduction
Sixty-three rare or previously uncollected works by a master of the American short story form
*A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed.
*A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem "Big Bull" de Kooning.
*A recipe for feeding sixty pork-sotted celebrants at your daughter's wedding.
*An outlandishly illustrated account of a scientific quest for God.
These astonishing tropes of the imagination could only have been generated by Donald Barthelme, who―until his death in 1989―seemed intent on goosing American letters into taking a quantum leap. Gleeful, melancholy, erudite, and wonderfully subversive, The Teachings of Don B. is a literary testament cum time bomb, with the power to blast any reader into an altered state of consciousness.
"A small education in laughter, melancholy, and the English language." ―The New York Times Book Review
“Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a distinctive master of fragments . . . Anger, wit, extravagant associations and disassociations; these would be less memorable if it were not for Barthelme's ability to evoke dreams and the tenderness with which he does it.” ―Los Angeles Times
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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, 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.
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$18.00
Sixty Stories
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.
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$20.00