Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Published 1981 · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Short Stories, Postmodern Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Sixty Stories to read?
Sixty Stories scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Barthelme draws vocabulary from every available register — art criticism, philosophy, advertising, military jargon, fairy tale — and the stories require comfort with rapid shifts between lexical worlds.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Sentences range from single-word fragments to elaborate parodies of academic or bureaucratic prose. The variety of syntactic modes across sixty stories is itself a form of complexity.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Many stories operate as thought experiments or conceptual fictions. The subject is often the nature of language, narrative, or meaning itself rather than any conventional dramatic situation.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Individual stories are often very short and compressed. The density varies widely — some are spare to the point of enigma, others are packed with parodic detail.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Barthelme rarely tells stories straight. Collage, fragmentation, non-sequitur, and formal experiment are the norm. The reader must construct meaning from juxtaposition rather than plot.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Barthelme's objects — the balloon, the glass mountain, the dead father — function as symbols but resist stable interpretation. Meaning is suggested and then withdrawn.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Irony is Barthelme's native mode. Nearly every story operates in the gap between surface and meaning, between the language characters use and what they feel or intend.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- Most stories end abruptly, enigmatically, or with a tonal shift that refuses conventional closure. Resolution is consistently withheld or subverted.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The stories employ a vast range of structural strategies — numbered lists, questionnaires, collage, fragmented dialogue, mock-treatise. Conventional narrative structure is the exception rather than the rule.
How Sixty Stories is regarded
Sixty Stories holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.