Sixty Stories
Barthelme was the central figure of American postmodernist short fiction. These collage-like stories mix high culture, advertising, fairy tales, and bureaucratic language. Still formally dazzling, and funnier than most comedy writing.
Barthelme's admirers respect the craft and still admit the moment-to-moment experience left them cold: one reader says plainly, “I enjoyed having read the stories much more than actually reading them”, the pleasure arriving in retrospect rather than on the page. Another asks outright, “How can I justify my indifference to Donald Barthelme?” despite acknowledging the innovation, calling the pieces “magazine stories, little pop-art bursts of colour” that never quite ignite. The Kierkegaard and Heidegger name-dropping reads to some as a barrier, intellectual exercise standing in for felt experience, and because the sixty pieces don't build toward anything, the collection is easy to put down and hard to read straight through in order. The structural gripe recurs too: a story finally finds its groove and then, as one reader puts it, “just when I really sink into the groove, the story ends.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
