Forty Stories

Forty Stories collects forty of Donald Barthelme's short stories, several of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. The book was first published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1987.

While Sixty Stories includes many longer narratives, the stories in Forty Stories are pithy. Many last for fewer than five pages, and display Barthelme's flash fictional tendencies. They also abound in historical references and surreal juxtapositions. One story involves a World War I Secret Police investigator, a trio of German warplanes, and the artist Paul Klee. Another is a parodic rewriting of the fairy-tale Bluebeard, perhaps inspired by Angela Carter's story "The Bloody Chamber." Yet another consists of a single seven-page-long sentence (without a concluding period).

The following stories appear in the book:


 * 1) Chablis
 * 2) On the Deck
 * 3) The Genius
 * 4) Opening
 * 5) Sindbad
 * 6) The Explanation
 * 7) Concerning the Bodyguard
 * 8) RIF
 * 9) The Palace at Four A.M.
 * 10) Jaws
 * 11) Conversations with Goethe
 * 12) Affection
 * 13) The New Owner
 * 14) Paul Klee [full title: "Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshoffen and Cambrai, March 1916"]
 * 15) Terminus
 * 16) The Educational Experience
 * 17) Bluebeard
 * 18) Departures
 * 19) Visitors
 * 20) The Wound
 * 21) At the Tolstoy Museum
 * 22) The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
 * 23) A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking
 * 24) The Temptation of St. Anthony
 * 25) Sentence
 * 26) Pepperoni
 * 27) Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
 * 28) Lightning
 * 29) The Catechist
 * 30) Porcupines at the University
 * 31) Sakrete
 * 32) Captain Blood
 * 33) 110 West Sixty-first Street
 * 34) The Film
 * 35) Overnight to Many Distant Cities
 * 36) Construction
 * 37) Letters to the Editore
 * 38) Great Days
 * 39) The Baby
 * 40) January

Sixty Stories
Sixty Stories, a companion volume to Forty Stories, was published six years earlier, in 1981. It contains stories from Barthelme's first six collections.