Forty Stories collects forty of American writer and professor 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 They also abound in historical references and surreal juxtapositions.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).
Contents Chablis On the Deck The Genius Opening Sindbad The Explanation Concerning the Bodyguard RIF The Palace at Four A.M. Jaws Conversations with Goethe Affection The New Owner Paul Klee [full title: "Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshoffen and Cambrai, March 1916"] Terminus The Educational Experience Bluebeard Departures Visitors The Wound At the Tolstoy Museum The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking The Temptation of St. Anthony Sentence Pepperoni Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby Lightning The Catechist Porcupines at the university Sakrete Captain Blood 110 West Sixty-first Street The Film Overnight to Many Distant Cities Construction Letters to the Editore Great Days The Baby 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.
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