Many last for fewer than five pages, and display Barthelme's flash fictional tendencies.

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).

This article about a collection of short stories published in the 1980s is a stub.