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 a way back to the modern world

As they cruise around Chesapeake Bay aboard their sailboat, Peter Sagamore and his very pregnant wife, Katherine, reveal the stories of their past and present

John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, "life" and "art" are two sides of the same coin. In this brief study, first published in 1987, Heide Ziegler examines all Barth’s novels. She argues that each pair of novels first "exhausts" and then "replenishes" those literary genres that hinge on a particular world view: the existentialist novel, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, or the realistic novel. Through the division of labour between character and author Barth manages to develop a new mode of literary parody which projects itself beyond the mocked literary model and even self-parody into the realm of future fiction. This book is ideal for students of literature and postmodern studies.

Product Description: A National Book Award winner, this bawdy, comic trio of novellas finds John Barth injecting his signature wit into three tales many times told: that of Scheherazade, storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights; of Perseus, slayer of Medusa; and of Bellerophon, rider of Pegasus and slayer of the Chimera...read more

Product Description: John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory―a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves...read more

Product Description: Written when John Barth was 24 years old, The Floating Opera is his first novel, published in 1957. It is a first-person reminiscence of the day Todd Andrews decided to commit suicide. Having picked up some sense of the French Existentialist writers from the postwar Zeitgeist, this novel questions life's value through the eyes of a 37-year-old man...read more

Product Description: “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 consider to have been its most interesting hour: the summer of the Peeping Tom...read more

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. Reprint.

The sixteenth book and third collection of stories by the critically acclaimed author of Chimera explores a wide variety of narrative approaches, including stories within stories, while also playfully examining the power of language in everyday life. Reprint.

Product Description: This book examines the twin problems of play and game in American literary postmodernism. There have been many studies of the function of play in postmodernism, but very few have discussed the role of game without conflating play and game...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Presented as a dozen tales exchanged by a middle-aged couple on vacation, an anthology of short stories explores the connections between language and thought, art and science, and life and love

Product Description: "Tell me a story..." Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore, 8 1/2 months pregnant, is a blue-blooded library scientist and founding mother of the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling. Her husband Peter, 8 1/2 months nervous, is a blue-collar storyteller with a penchant for brevity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "Whether discussing modernism, postmodernism, semiotics, Homer, Cervantes, Borges, blue crabs or osprey nests, Barth demonstrates an enthusiasm for the life of the mind, a joy in thinking (and in expressing those thoughts) that becomes contagious...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: In contrast to recent attempts to distinguish postmodernism from poststructuralism, Death in the FUNhouse finds deep complicity between the two discourses. This book looks comprehensively at the middle and late texts of John Barth to demonstrate the complexity of the postmodern author - and the never-ending quest for pleasure...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An acclaimed author offers a witty collection of essays inspired by his Friday muse--the nonfiction one--and covers a variety of topics, from postmodern fiction and chaos theory to memory, imagination, and the arabesque.

The letters of seven people, including a British gentlewoman who finds herself pregnant by her young American lover and a bachelor lawyer who enjoys incest on his final cruise in preparation for suicide, take readers on a journey through history

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Barth's complex, controversial models of ideas are interpreted to guide the intelligent first reader through these virtuoso presentations of the narrative process. Explicating the text with attention to published criticism on Barth and to Barth's own published literary theory as well as the theory intrinsic to the novels, Zack Bowen carefully builds an informed perspective on the fiction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Tobin, Patricia Drechsel

Product Description: The main aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive guide to the major writings of John Barth - the author of "The Floating Opera", "The End of the Road", "Chimera", "The Tidewater Tales: A Novel" and other works. With roots in the 20-century existential tradition, Barth sees human beings stripped of their beliefs in universal values and systems of belief - in God, tradition, reason or literary formulations...read more

Product Description: Book by Schulz, Professor Max F.

Product Description: An important book.