Sixty Stories

Donald Barthelme

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Sixty Stories brings together Barthelme's most famous works and hidden gems—a dazzling, subversive collection where language bends, reality warps, and the absurd reigns supreme. With these subversive, razor-sharp stories, Donald Barthelme dismantles the familiar and rearranges it into something dazzlingly strange. Here, the ordinary mutates into the uncanny—an enormous balloon hovers over the city, its purpose debated by those below; a classroom lesson spirals into something darker and more profound; two men locked in a Cold War bunker teeter on the edge of madness. Elsewhere, a friend struggles to coax the Phantom of the Opera out of his shadowy refuge, and an entire town is made up of nothing but churches. Barthelme moves effortlessly between deadpan satire, dream logic, and moments of startling beauty, crafting stories that are as unsettling as they are irresistible.