The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road are John Barth's first two novels.Their relationship to each other is evident not only in their ribald subject matter but in the eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone of the narratives. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on the emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama. Together they illustrate the beginnings of an illustrious career."

In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.

This playful and jazzy triad about fateful threesomes provides an engagingly postmodern commentary on the art of storytelling, classic mythology, and literature. The first novella explores a callow undergraduate's initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The wandering hero of the next tale finds an all-too-familiar road made new by some provocative traveling companions. And the three sisters of the third piece recall their youthful days of muselike services to (and scandalous servicing of) a mysteriously vanished famous novelist. These three sexy novellas prove once...

The wildly varied essays in Not-Knowing combine to form a posthumous manifesto of one of America's masters of literary experiment. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two previously unpublished; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

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. Something has disturbed the comfortably retired denizens of a pristine Florida-style gated community in Chesapeake Bay country. In the dawn of the new millennium and the evening of their lives, these empty nesters discover that their tidy enclave can be as colorful, shocking, and surreal as any of John Barth s fictional locales. From the high jinks of a...

John Barth stays true to form in Every Third Thought, written from the perspective of a character Barth introduced in his short story collection The Development.
George I. Newett and his wife Amanda Todd lived in the gated community of Heron Bay Estates until its destruction by a fluke tornado. This event, Newett notes, occurred on the 77th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, a detail that would appear insignificant if it were not for several subsequent events.
The stress of the tornado's devastation prompts the Newett-Todds to depart on a European vacation, during which...