Donald Barthelme is the father of postmodern fiction and funny as all hell. This page represents everything I could find written by him on the web, some select extra commentary, and some stories I scanned myself or others contributed.

If you know of any other full-text sources, chunky excerpts or fun anecdotes please email me. Please check the mini-faq before emailing me DB questions.

Stories There

• At the End of the Mechanical Age
• The Balloon (rtf)
• The Captured Woman
• City of Churches (chinese & english)
• The Game
• Me and Miss Mandible
• The Piano Player
• The School
• The Zombies (translated in Chinese)

Bits of Stories

• Excerpts from 60 and 40 Stories
• Excerpt from The King

Audiovisual

• DB interviewed by Stephen Banker & reading The Policeman's Ball (1978)
• DB interviewed by George Plimpton
• I Bought a Little City (audio, read by Donald Antrim)
• Concerning the Bodyguard (audio, read by Salman Rushdie)
• The Indian Uprising (audio, read by Chris Adrian)

Bibliography

• 40 Stories*
• 60 Stories*
• Amateurs*
• City Life*
• Come Back, Dr. Caligari*
• The Dead Father*
• Great Days*
• Guilty Pleasures*
• The King*
• Not-knowing : the essays and interviews of Donald Barthelme *
• Overnight to Many Distant Cities*
• Paradise*
• Presents*
• Sadness*
• Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or the Hithering Thithering Djinn
• Snow White*
• Teachings of Don Barthelme
• Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts*
• Flying to America*

contributor to:

• Exquisite Creatures
• Jim Love up to Now
• Liquid City
• Robert Rauschenberg, Work from Four Series
• Sam's Bar

* indicates a book I own

Mini FAQ

• I got permission from Frederick Barthelme to reprint these stories. His email address is findable online. He was very nice. I have heard you may need to contact Nick Wylie Agency of New York for for-profit uses of DBs works.
• Please do not ask me to do your homework for you. If you don't understand a story you have to read for class, try reading a few reviews of it, or some literary criticism.
• If you want to know what book a short story is in, many online library catalogs contain this level of detail, you may be able to find the answer yourself.
• If you want to buy his books, might I suggest half.com or powells?

Stories Here

• Critique de la Vie Quotidienne
• Rebecca
• Glass Mountain
• Swallowing [NYT, 1972]
• The Ontological Basis of Two [pdf, written under pseudonym Michael Houston]
• King of Jazz
• Languishing, half-deep in summer...
• The Party
• The Sentence
• The Expedition
• Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning
• The Phantom of the Opera's Friend
• Cortes and Montezuma
• Daumier
• The Death of Edward Lear
• Departures
• The Dolt
• The first thing the baby did wrong...
• The Great Hug
• I wrote a letter...
• Me and Miss Mandible
• The Rise of Capitalism
• Shower of Gold
• Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby

Lit Crit and Essays

• The Devil's Decalogue - DB reviews Edward Gorey
• Donald Barthelme Saved From Drowning (png file) by John Leonard. A review of Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
• The Frequency: Solving the Riddle of the Dan Rather Beating by Paul Limbert Allman
• Donald Barthelme's Syllabus by Kevin Moffett
• Excerpt from a DB Interview with J. D. O'Hara
• Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme's 'Snow White.'
• Father-murder and father-rescue: the post-Freudian allegories of Donald Barthelme
• Donald Barthelme: The Modernist Uprising
• Mutant Anxiety: On Reading Barthelme's Narrator in "Me and Miss Mandible."
• An essay on The Indian Uprising
• Lit Crit: Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning
• Lit Crit: Views of My Father Weeping
• Lit Crit: Me and Miss Mandible
• Lit Crit: The Indian Uprising

Biographical & Facts

• Barthelme Bio Info from Gale's Contemporary Authors
• brief bio from online handbook of Texas
• Barthelme's Papers -- includes bio info.
• DB bio from The Literary Encyclopedia
• A few DB photos from 1987
• one DB photograph

Non-Stories

• Letters to Don B. by Thomas Pynchon, George Plimpton, others
• Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction from Studies in Short Fiction
• Apollo and Dionysus: Donald Barthelme's dance of life from Studies in Short Fiction
• DB's reading list
• Some Questions about Donald Barthelme interview with a former student
• DB images & bookcovers [the best DB resource]
• IMDB listing of two films written by DB
• NYTimes article by DB: "Grace Paley Faces Jail With 3 Other Writers "
• Thinking Man's Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme
• TOC to Overnight to Many Distant Cities and 40 Stories
• Some Don B. reviews
• Pynchon on Barthelme
• Don B. in the New York Times Book Review