SOURCE: Brown, Frank Burch. Review of Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme. Christian Century (31 March 1982): 385-86.

In the following review, Brown views Sixty Stories as a welcome overview of Barthelme's work and “gives ample evidence that contemporary writing and stories of this kind defy capsule description.”

At 50 Donald Barthelme has established himself as a remarkable—and remarkably influential—writer with a seemingly boundless capacity for invention. This representative collection of 60 stories [Sixty Stories] provides a welcome overview of his work to date, including an excerpt from the novel The Dead Father and five stories not previously available in book form. It also gives ample evidence that contemporary writing and art can be most frustrating at the very points at which they succeed most brilliantly.

More than one critic has called Barthelme's stories “parables”—presumably because the works are short, perplexing and suggestive, verging (one might suppose) on some larger...