Sixty Stories

Summary

Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction. Barthelme works by collage and fragment: he mixes the vocabulary of advertising, bureaucracy, philosophy, art criticism and pop culture; he builds stories from lists, questionnaires, dialogues without attribution, and illustrations; and he places absurd premises inside matter-of-fact narration. Beneath the play there is frequently grief, loneliness and moral seriousness. In 'The Balloon' an enormous balloon appears over Manhattan and the city's inhabitants respond to it in every possible way, until the narrator reveals a private reason for its appearance connected with a separation from his lover. 'Me and Miss Mandible' is the diary of a thirty-five-year-old man who, through a bureaucratic error, has been placed in a sixth-grade class, where he falls for his teacher. 'The Indian Uprising' describes a city under attack by Comanches, with barricades built from domestic furniture, as a fractured love story and an oblique response to the Vietnam era. 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning' assembles fragmentary glimpses of the public man. 'Views of My Father Weeping' follows a narrator investigating the death of his father, run over by an aristocrat's carriage, while repeatedly glimpsing the father crying. 'Game' is told by one of two officers locked in an underground missile bunker who must turn their keys together and are slowly losing their minds. 'Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby' is a deadpan account of friends planning the hanging of a man who has gone too far. 'The School' recounts, in a teacher's casual voice, a year in which everything in a classroom dies, from plants and pets to parents, and the children ask what death means. 'The Glass Mountain' is a numbered-sentence parody of a fairy-tale quest. 'The Death of Edward Lear' imagines the poet staging his own death as a performance. 'Florence Green is 81' concerns an elderly wealthy woman and the people who orbit her. The collection is comic and sad at once, and its fragments together form a portrait of anxious, overinformed modern life.

Top Lessons

• Fragments can carry feeling

  Barthelme's broken forms are not merely clever; they mirror how modern consciousness receives the world in pieces. The stories show that collage can be a vehicle for grief and tenderness.

• Language as a material

  Barthelme treats jargon, clichés and media phrases as found objects. Reading him trains attention to how institutional language shapes and evades meaning.

• Explaining death to children

  'The School' turns a sequence of deaths into black comedy and ends with the children's real questions about meaning. It shows how absurdity can open a space for serious inquiry.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is not a major subject, but several stories touch on psychiatric and existential themes. 'Game' portrays two missile-silo officers whose isolation and protocol produce paranoia and breakdown, a satire of Cold War nuclear doctrine. 'The School' and 'Views of My Father Weeping' are oblique studies of death, bereavement and how children and adults talk about loss. 'Florence Green is 81' touches on old age and the people who surround the wealthy elderly. A story titled 'Brain Damage' may also be included in the selection. Treat any clinical reading as metaphorical: Barthelme's madness is mostly a satire of institutional reason.

• 'Game'

  Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.

• 'The School'

  A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.

• 'Views of My Father Weeping'

  A son investigates his father's death in a carriage accident while visions of the weeping father intrude.

• 'Florence Green is 81'

  Portrait of an elderly rich woman and the hangers-on gathered around her.