John Barth

"...The Friday Book was the first work of nonfiction by novelist John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Chimera. Taking its title from the day of the week Barth would devote to nonfiction, the three dozen essays discuss a wide range of topics from the blue crabs of Barth's beloved Chesapeake Bay to weighty literary subjects such as Borges, Homer, and semiotics..."--www.amazon.com.

Essays and Other Nonfiction

The Friday Book

Professor John Barth

Basically, [Barth] takes several people from his early novels and has them all starting to write to each other, and to him, their letters and experiences directing the plot. And what starts out as what could be a too-cute literary trick winds up being extremely revealing, as the characters pour themselves into the letters, regardless of whom they're writing to, as the plot skips and slips through time. On one level it acts as a sequel to those early novels, continuing their stories and although it's not really required to read those books, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't help. The best thing to do would be to read those old novels in one block and then move onto this ... I read them some years ago so I was a little fuzzy on the finer points. But I picked it up. But Barth captures the voices of his old characters well and even if you didn't know who was writing what letter, you could tell. And thus they tell the recepient, and us, about their hopes and fears, they mingle together, they lie, they come unglued, and by the end you sort of get a tapestry of their thoughts. There's a plot weaving through here but sometimes it becomes hard to connect it with six different people discussing different angles of it with you, but I just went with it and enjoyed the writing for what it was. --Michael Battaglia at Amazon.com.

A Novel

Letters

Tells the stories of a man's struggle with the idea of suicide and of a bed-hopping threesome brought together by a strange doctor-psychiatrist-mentor

The Floating Opera and The End of the Road

Subtitled "a romance," Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature--part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe--and her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers, a direct descendant of the author of "The Star Spangled Banner" and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead. True to its subtitle, the novel combines the mysterious and marvelous (unexplained disappearances, a fabled sea monster in Chesapeake Bay) with romantic love and daring adventure. Sabbatical is quintessential Barth: it involves sailing, twinship, the joy of love and literature, the sorrow of death and disaster, and a playfully complex narrative. The author has written a foreword for this new edition.

A Romance

Sabbatical

A collection of stories explores a wide variety of narrative approaches, including stories within stories, while also examining the playful power of language in everyday life.

Eleven Stories

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.

The Tidewater Tales

L'opera galleggiante

Essays cover a variety of topics, from postmodern fiction and chaos theory to memory, imagination, and the arabesque

Essays, Lectures and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994

Further Fridays

A collection of interconnected short stories follows a group of retirees living in a gated community in Chesapeake Bay country as their lives are thrown into turmoil by marital infidelities, a bizarre suicide pact, and the sudden destruction of the short-

Nine Stories

The Development

While retracing the legendary voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, journalist Simon William Behler finds himself in Sindbad's household in medieval Baghdad and competes with Sindbad in a storytelling marathon in the hopes of finding way back to the modern world. Reprint.

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Using the venerable literary device of the bedtime story, which links fictions as different as The Arabian Nights and Charlotte's Web, John Barth ingeniously interweaves stories from an ongoing, high-spirited but deadly serious nocturnal game of tale-telling by a more or less desperate loving couple vacationing at their "last resort". As Scheherazade spun out her bedtime stories to save her life, the narrator of On with the Story spins out his to postpone The End, and to explore en route - wittily, mournfully, tenderly - love in modern life and postmodern literature. As the narrative cycles through the lifescapes of his subjects' stories, Barth affords a view both panoramic and microscopic of our own landscape. With eye and pen both sharp and beautiful he depicts love ranging from the obsessively puppy through the sophisticatedly fatigued, the delusionally murderous, even the quantum-physical, to the superbly fulfilled.

Stories Tag - A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

On with the Story

After a fluke tornado destroys George I. Newett's neighborhood, a series of strange coincidences relating to the stock market crash of 1929 occur, causing him to experience five serial visions corresponding to pivotal events in his life.

A Novel in Five Seasons

Every Third Thought

The distinguished author speculates on the future of literature and the literature of the future, looks back upon his own novels, and comments upon various aspects of writing

Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice

Lost in the Funhouse

La fine della strada

Aslı Biçer

Masal Masal İçinde

Or, The Revised New Syllabus

Giles Goat-boy

Two writers, a retiring novelist and an aspiring writer of hypertext, compete to create a novel of a floating opera and explore the cultural lines between print and electronic fiction, and modernism and postmoderism. Reprint.

A Narrative

Coming Soon!!!

Exploring the themes of heroism, sex, and death, a trio of novellas by the critically acclaimed author of Chimera includes "Tell Me," about a young undergraduate's initiation into the mysteries of love, life, and the Heroic Cycle; "I've Been Told," which traces the history of storytelling; and "As I Was Saying," in which three elderly sisters record their services for a notorious and missing novelist.

Novellas

Where Three Roads Meet

When Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Not only did the book reach a popular audience, but it also became a staple of what was being read in universities across America. Suddenly there was a "new kind of fiction" being written and read, and at least for some short while became the standard of what fiction is. Barth's fiction wasn't a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American fiction at the time, but was in fact beckoning back to the founders of fiction: Cervantes, The Thousand and One Nights, Rabelaise, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and defining the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction. This collection of John Barth's short fiction is a landmark event, bringing together all of his previous collections, together with a few new stories. In brief, its occasion is a time for standing back to admire and assess a lifetime's work. Stunningly original in a way that Barth's work always is, the publication of this collection represents a very important chapter in the history of American literature. Dalkey Archive will also be reissuing a number of Barth's novels over the next few years and permanently preserving his work for generations to come.

John Barth

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