Read for a writing friend who told me “[Barthelme’s] stories are so funny you can read them aloud at parties,” and then refused to invite me to the kinds of parties where people read Barthelme out loud; he later covered by saying something about how he’d only said you can read them aloud at parties but that didn’t mean he actually went to parties where people read Barthelme out loud. After having read forty of Barthelme’s stories now, I think that willfully fixating on this syntactical misconstr...

I openly admit my tastes tends to be a bit quirky, even oddball, which probably accounts for the fact that I really, really, really enjoyed two stories in this collection, two stories not given so much as a mention in other reviews, at least the ones I’ve read on this thread. And what, you may ask, are those two Donald Barthelme stories? Answer: Chablis and The New Owner. And I really, really, really had a blast doing the write-up of each of these yummy chocolate snappers. After sampling as per

Forty Things to Know About Barthelme1. He had a beard.2. He had a bad relationship with his father.3. His father was an architect of some renown4. He was an experimental writer, considered by many to be among the best of his generation.5. Taking a sample of ten Barthelme stories, three will be genius, six will be good, one will be crap.6. His more famous stories include "The Balloon," "Me and Mrs. Mandible," "At the End of the Mechanical Age," "King of Jazz" (none of which are included here), "T...

Donald Barthelme is an experimental and postmodern writer who employs a wide range of strange devices that helped him create emotion and feeling in the reader. In his short story collection, 40 Stories, he constructs an entire story though a question and answer session, he juxtaposes pictures with text to create greater effect, and one story is several letters to an editor. I have chosen to focus on one story in the collection in order to fully explain what is at play in Barthelme’s writing so a...

love this fucking guy holy shit. Dave Eggers did the intro (:///) but a fantastic writer with stories that made me howl laughing and stories that made me really sad. Every story is like 3 or 4 pages and so delightful, you can feel Barthelme find a word and just savor it like a caramel. So eminently readable but so opaque in meaning, if not the meaning being the pleasure of reading itself. Fantastic can't wait to read more.

This is the funniest book I have read in a long time. I can't remember the last book that made me laugh out loud as much as this one. Barthelme has to be one of the most underrated writers of the last century.The stories in this collection are very short, usually 3-5 pages, and all are fairly fragmented, oblique works of art. I'd recommend Barthelme to any fan of the post-moderns or experimental fiction in general. You know you are in for a good story that opens with lines like: "Some of us had

Just delightful. Highlights:ChablisConcerning the BodyguardJawsThe New OwnerEngineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshoffen and Cambrai, March 1916Bluebeard DeparturesVisitors The WoundAt the Tolstoy Museum The Temptation of St. Anthony Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend ColbySakreteMost of the others have lovely redeeming features too.

From "Engineer-Private Paul Klee misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambral, March 1916" :"We do not have your secrets and that is what we are after, your secrets. Our first secret is where we are. No one knows. Our second secret is how many of us there are. No one knows. Omnipresence is our goal. We do not even need real omnipresence. The theory of omnipresence is enough. With omnipresence, hand-in-hand as it were, goes omniscience. And with omniscience and omnipresence, hand-in-ha...

Usually when I find a pile of books in a box on the sidewalk it's filled with junk books, like self-help finance twaddle and new-age crap about death and terrible pop fiction. So imagine my surprise when, underneath The Artist's Way and Lovely Bones, I found this book! Yay!!Anyway, this was both better and worse than I expected. As a collection, it's really uneven; some stories I could only read a paragraph or two before frantically paging through to the next one, whereas others I actually re-re...

I was very intrigued with this book. I like how the stories are all short and can be read easily in one sitting. They all are so different, and yet have a similar tone. I like how they take me to a unique place every time, a world which I might have never been exposed to. I don't feel I can honestly say that I understand any of these stories, but there are some of them that definitely strike me as being more meaningful than others and some which I feel just depend on personal preference. Regardl...

When I was a child, barely a teen, two of my suburban high school’s advanced-placement word nerds were fond of flashing a shared Donald Barthelme paperback that had a sexually suggestive cover illustration, perhaps featuring a woman’s bare breasts. These guys, the type of guys who could recite swatches of dialogue from 200 Motels, cornered you at lunch while you were trying to get high like a normal person and read concise sections of Barthelme, then lurked in smug silence as if they had just dr...

I am so glad that I came to Donald Barthelme by way of Charles Baxter. And after reading Barthelme's short fiction, I understand more fully why Dave Eggers felt like a thief after reading Barthelme following the publication of his fiction. He's an original, a genre defining giant, and his writing just doesn't give a shit whether or not you get it (admittedly several stories, I didn't) - he's plowing forward without you."Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby" (found here for free http:...

Where do I start? The stories are one dimensional, with paper thin characters composing uninteresting snippets of lives of the above mentioned characters. I couldn't even finish the whole book because it was just aweful. No real sense of togetherness (which is usually an underlying theme in a collection of work), no real direction, either. The stories are trite, boring, and worse, poorly structured.

Why is fiction a story long or short?  Why do stories have to be realistic, have beginnings, middles and ends?  These are questions I'm considering as a reader but they are questions that Barthelme could - were he as pretentious as I'm sounding here - be asking us in his work.In his 'stories,' he uses many forms - interviews, news accounts, Q&As, multimedia elements and folktales.  Barthelme creates an internal logic to his work that doesn't necessarily conform to external logic.  He doesn't car...

I don't know what happened. There I was, excited to cadge a library copy of a Barthelme book, a rarity on these shores, having stored up eight months of warm feelings for Sixty Stories. But no. It all came crashing down with this insufferable series of self-ironising experiments, non sequiturs, intellectual masturbations and opaque parodies.What happened? Well, it is entirely possible Sixty Stories exhausted the capabilities of Mr. B, so widely adored among the McSweeney's generation, serving up...

Why has it taken me so long to read Donald Barthelme? I’ve known about him for years and own several of his books. I think it’s because dipping into FORTY STORIES is like going to another country where you don’t known the language or the customs, which are familiar but just askew enough to remain foreign. There’s a sense of adventure in turning these pages, and I guess initially I’m uncomfortable. It takes me a beat to get past the shock of the new. My favorite things were usually the most despi...

My first exposure to the works of Donald Barthelme was from the New Yorker fiction podcast, where famous authors join the show and read their favorite stories from the back volumes of the magazine.The story that caught my attention was “Concerning the bodyguard” read by Salman Rushdie (https://bit.ly/2Ng7MWx) which describes an assassination attempt on a fictional dictator in Central America. The novel aspect is that the entire story is written as a set of questions, in the form of an interrogat...

I havn't written any reviews on this thing yet, but this book was really what I've been looking for in fiction for a long time. Ecstatic language that goes on sprawling tangents with wonderful imagery that is woven together into very concise endings. It's also extremely witty and hilarious. All of these qualities make it a very enjoyable read but at the same time it's also intelligent and academic. Barthelme definitely knows exactly what he's doing.

If the dog-eared pages are anything to go by, I didn't love this collection quite as much as the earlier collection, Sixty Stories. For me, it didn't have quite the same capacity for revelatory disruption of the first collection and some of the stories here seemed almost formalistically experimental; Barthelme doing Barthelme, so to speak.That said, this is still a cracker of a collection and the best of the stories hold up against anything he wrote. As a sentence maker, Barthelme is almost unri...

This collection contains some definite highlights - my three favorites were “Bluebeard”, “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby”, and “Sindbad”. If Barthelme could write persistently at that level of quality and legibility this collection would be 5 stars. Unfortunately forty stories gives the author a lot of opportunities to disappoint, and many were either unmemorable or actually intolerable. Still, it’s a quick read, the highs outweigh the lows, and postmodernism’s overall reputati...