Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Forty Stories

Forty Stories

Barthelme, Donald

Paperback

Classic FictionGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1250420296
ISBN13: 9781250420299
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

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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