''Forty Stories'' collects forty of
Donald Barthelme's short stories, several of which originally appeared in ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
''. The book was first published by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
G. P. Putnam's Sons is an American book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since 1996, it has been an imprint of the Penguin Group.
History
The company began as Wiley & Putnam with the 1838 partnership between George Palmer Putnam and J ...
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 fiction
Flash fiction is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story (also known as " twitterature"); ...
al 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 They also abound in historical references and surreal juxtapositions.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
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...
. Another is a parodic rewriting of the fairy-tale
Bluebeard
"Bluebeard" (french: Barbe bleue, ) is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in ''Histoires ou contes du temps passé''. The tale tells the st ...
, perhaps inspired by
Angela Carter's story "
The Bloody Chamber
''The Bloody Chamber'' (or ''The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories'') is a collection of short fiction by English writer Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary ...
." Yet another consists of a single seven-page-long sentence (without a concluding period).
The following stories appear in the book:
# 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
ull 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.
1987 short story collections
American short story collections
G. P. Putnam's Sons books
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