Forty Stories

In Forty Stories, Donald Barthelme invented a random universe in which time, reality, meaning and language are turned exuberantly upside-down. He describes a startling array of occurrences – a lumberjack falls in love with a tree nymph; the poet Goethe becomes a loveable buffoon, spouting such eccentric aphorisms as ‘Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of History’; St Anthony’s reclusive behaviour causes consternation among his friends and neighbours; and a vast swarm of porcupines, about to descend upon a university to enrol, forces the Dean to turn wrangler to herd them away. Tangling with the ludicrous and challenging the familiar, these small masterpieces provide piercing and hilarious insights into human idiosyncrasies.