John Barth

From one of our most celebrated masters, a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community I find myself inclined to set down for whomever, before my memory goes kaput altogether, some account of our little community, in particular of what Margie and I …

Sabbatical: A Romance is a novel by the American writer John Barth, published in 1982. The story is centered on a yacht race through the Chesapeake Bay. Barth's narrative was inspired by the death of ex-CIA officer John Paisley.

LETTERS is an epistolary novel by the American writer John Barth, published in 1979. It consists of a series of letters in which Barth and the characters of his other books interact. In addition to the Author and Germaine Pitt, the correspondents are: Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A.B. Cook, Jerome Bray and Ambrose …

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor is a novel by American writer John Barth, published in 1991. It is a postmodern metafictional story of a man who jumps overboard a modern replica of a medieval Arab ship and is rescued by sailors from the world of Sinbad the Sailor. Eventually he makes his way to "Baghdad, the …

The End of the Road is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. The irony-laden black comedy's protagonist Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. As …

In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these …

The Floating Opera is a novel by American writer John Barth, first published in 1956 and significantly revised in 1967. Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a first-person account of a day protagonist Todd Andrews contemplated suicide. Critics and Barth himself often pair The Floating …