Sixty Stories

By: Donald Barthelme

Published by Picador, 2026-05-26

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. Sixty Stories is a literary fun house where language is bent, meaning is slippery, and the absurd is never far from the truth.

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. Whether you’re encountering his work for the first time or returning for another descent into his linguistic labyrinth, Sixty Stories is a testament to a writer who saw the world askew—and showed us how thrilling that could be.