Forty Stories collects forty of Donald Barthelme's short stories, several of which originally appeared in The New Yorker . The book was first published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1987.
While Sixty Stories includes many longer narratives, the stories in Forty Stories are pithy. Many last for fewer than five pages, and display Barthelme's flash fictional tendencies. They also abound in historical references and surreal juxtapositions. One story involves a World War I Secret Police investigator, a trio of German warplanes, and the artist Paul Klee. Another is a parodic rewriting of the fairy-tale Bluebeard, perhaps inspired by Angela Carter's story "The Bloody Chamber." Yet another consists of a single seven-page-long sentence (without a concluding period).
The following stories appear in the book:
Sixty Stories , a companion volume to Forty Stories, was published six years earlier, in 1981. It contains stories from Barthelme's first six collections.
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Elfquest is a comic book property created by Wendy and Richard Pini in 1978. It is a fantasy story about a community of elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons. Several published volumes of prose fiction also share the same setting. Elfquest was one of the first comic book series to have a planned conclusion. Over the years Elfquest has been self-published by the Pinis through their own company Warp Graphics, then Marvel Comics, then the Pinis again, more recently DC Comics and then Dark Horse Comics. All issues of Elfquest published prior to 2014 are available online for free.
Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe.
"Bluebeard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word "Bluebeard" the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb "bluebearding" has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women.
Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988) is a 1987 novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut. It is told as a first-person narrative and describes the late years of fictional Abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, who first appeared as a minor character in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (1973). Circumstances of the novel bear rough resemblance to the fairy tale of Bluebeard popularized by Charles Perrault. Karabekian mentions this relationship once in the novel.
Bluebeard's Castle is a one-act expressionist opera by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The libretto was written by Béla Balázs, a poet and friend of the composer, and is written in Hungarian, based on the French literary tale La Barbe bleue by Charles Perrault. The opera lasts only a little over an hour and there are just two singing characters onstage: Bluebeard, and his new wife Judith ; the two have just eloped and Judith is coming home to Bluebeard's castle for the first time.
The Black Widowers is a fictional men-only dining club created by Isaac Asimov for a series of sixty-six mystery stories that he started writing in 1971. Most of the stories were first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, though a few first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the various book collections into which the stories were eventually gathered.
Dark Horse Presents was a comic book published by American company Dark Horse Comics from 1986. Their first published series, it was their flagship title until its September 2000 cancellation. The second incarnation was published on MySpace, running from July 2007 until August 2010. A third incarnation began in April 2011, released in print form once again.
Donald Barthelme was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction, and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Asterix and the Magic Carpet is the twenty-eighth volume of the Asterix comic book series, by René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations). It was first published in 1987. It is the fourth book to be published after the death of René Goscinny and is thus both written and drawn by Albert Uderzo alone.
James Bond's success after the start of the film franchise in 1962 spawned a number of comic books around the world. Initially, these were adaptations of various movies. In the late 1980s and continuing through to the mid-1990s, however, a series of original stories were also published. After a hiatus in 1996, the Bond comic book publishing license was picked up again and made a revival debut in 2015. The comics were published by various past and present companies including DC Comics, Marvel, Eclipse Comics, Dark Horse and Dynamite Entertainment.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
Barbe-bleue is an opéra bouffe, or operetta, in three acts by Jacques Offenbach to a French libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy based on Charles Perrault's 1697 story.
Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley, was an English girls' story writer, who took the name Oxenham as her pseudonym when her first book, Goblin Island, was published in 1907. Her Abbey Series of 38 titles are her best-known and best-loved books. In her lifetime she had 87 titles published and another two have since been published by her niece, who discovered the manuscripts in the early 1990s. She is considered a major figure among girls' story writers of the first half of the twentieth century, being one of the 'Big Three' with Elinor Brent-Dyer and Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Angela Brazil is as well-known - perhaps more so - but did not write her books in series about the same group of characters or set in the same place or school, as did the Big Three.
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties is a book by British music critic and author Ian MacDonald, discussing the music of the Beatles and the band's relationship to the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. The first edition was published in 1994, with revised editions appearing in 1997 and 2005, the latter following MacDonald's death in 2003.
The Dead Father is a post-modernist novel by author Donald Barthelme published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book relates the journey of a vaguely defined entity that symbolizes fatherhood, hauled by a small group of people as the plot unravels through narratives, anecdotes, dialogues, reflexions and allegories presented to the reader through the tools and constructions of postmodern literature, in which the author excelled as a short story writer. Chapter 17 includes an adapted version of a previously published short story, "A Manual for Sons", that is much in the style and character of the novel.
Russ Cochran was a publisher of EC Comics reprints, Disney comics, and books on Hopalong Cassidy, Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and vacuum tubes. He was a publisher for over 30 years, after quitting his job as a physics professor.
Sixty Stories is a collection of sixty short stories written by Donald Barthelme's, several of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. The book was first published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1981.
"Good News from the Vatican" is a 1971 science fiction short story by American author Robert Silverberg, featuring the election of a robot to the position of Pope of the Church of Rome. It won that year's Nebula Award for Best Short Story.
Klee Wyck (1941) is a memoir by Canadian artist Emily Carr. Through short sketches, the artist tells of her experiences among First Nations people and cultures on British Columbia's west coast. The book won the 1941 Governor General's Award and occupies an important place in Canadian literature.