Collected Stories

by John Barth

Overview

When John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Barth’s writing was not a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American literature at the time; it beckoned back to the founders of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and reflecting the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction.

This collection of Barth’s short fiction is a landmark event, bringing all of his previous collections together in one volume for the first time. Its occasion helps readers assess a remarkable lifetime’s work and represents an important chapter in the history of American literature. Dalkey Archive will reissue a number of Barth’s novels over the next few years, preserving his work for generations to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628972122
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	10/30/2015
Series:	American Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland in 1930. He stands alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the giants of postwar American fiction. He is the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, and The Last Voyage of Somebody.
John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly.

Table of Contents

Contents On with the Stories! 1 (An introduction to Collected Stories by John Barth) LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE (1968) 5 Lost in the Funhouse (Foreword to the Anchor Books Edition) 7 Author’s Note (1968) 10 Frame-Tale 13 Night-Sea Journey 15 Ambrose His Mark 24 Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction 42 Water-Message 46 Petition 61 Lost in the Funhouse 73 Echo 96 Two Meditations 101 Title 102 Glossolalia 110 Life-Story 112 Menelaiad 124 Anonymiad 156 Seven Additional Author’s Notes (1969) 185 ON WITH THE STORY (1996) 189 Check-in 193 1. The End: An Introduction 197 Pillow Talk: “That’s a story?” 205 2. Ad Infinitum: A Short Story 206 “That’s more like it.” 214 3· And Then One Day . . . 216 “Dot dot dot? . . .” 232 4· Preparing for the Storm 234 “‘Yes, well,’ 245 5· On with the Story 247 “Maybe . . . 266 6. Love Explained 268 “You’re putting words in her mouth.” 273 7· “Waves,” by Amien Richard 275 “No comment.” 305 8. Stories of Our Lives 307 “Hold on, there.” 332 9· Closing Out the Visit 334 “That says it. Time to go.” 341 10. Good-bye to the Fruits 342 “I’ll say yes to that.” 350 11. Ever After 351 Pillow Talk: Presently 367 12. Countdown: Once Upon a Time 368 THE BOOK OF TEN NIGHTS AND A NIGHT (2004) 395 Invocation: “WYSIWYG” 397 ] Help! 405 FIRST NIGHT 409 Landscape: The Eastern Shore 414 SECOND NIGHT 420 The Ring 435 THIRD NIGHT 445 Dead Cat, Floating Boy 452 FOURTH NIGHT 462 A Detective and a Turtle 467 FIFTH NIGHT 483 The Rest of Your Life 488 SIXTH NIGHT 506 The Big Shrink 512 SEVENTH NIGHT 523 Extension 528 EIGHTH NIGHT 535 And Then There’s the One 538 NINTH NIGHT 555 9999 559 TENTH NIGHT 577 Click 583 ELEVENTH NIGHT 607 WYSIWYG? 616 AFTERWORDS 633 THE DEVELOPMENT (2008) 637 Peeping Tom 639 Toga Party 660 Teardown 687 The Bard Award 701 Progressive Dinner 719 Us/ Them 739 Assisted Living 751 The End 761 Rebeginning 773

Editorial Reviews

…a fine testament to a unique talent.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Burn

08/03/2015
The work of John Barth, whose novels defined the postmodern ’60s even as they gestured in the direction of Scheherazade and Boccaccio, is in dire need of reassessment, which makes a Collected Stories welcome. Four Barth collections are assembled by Dalkey, including 1968’s Lost in the Funhouse, generally regarded as a masterpiece. And rightfully so, with its carnivalesque deconstruction of the coming-of-age story (the title story and others), revisionist Greek myths (“Echo”), and upending of literary conventions both minimal (“Title”) and maximal (“Anonymiad”) exhilarating as ever. Barth’s next collection, On with the Story, didn’t appear until 1996 and there’s something noticeably labored in the cadence of the writer/narrator who theorizes fruitlessly around his protagonists (Cape Cod professorial types mostly) who theorize an awful lot on their own works (One story begins, “‘Are we particles,’ Amy wants to know, ‘or waves?’”). But the other two collections—2004’s The Book of Ten Nights and a Night and 2008’s The Development—are a revelation, the first being essentially a series of false starts by a writer called Graybard in the wake of 9/11 and the second a series of nested suburban yarns set in a gated community, where the conversation and atmosphere is thick with Bush-era malaise. This is a hefty omnibus, clocking in at 800 pages, and may be a bit overwhelming to neophytes of the author. But for Barth devotees, it’s a gift to have so much in one place. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"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." — Washington Post

From the Publisher

2015-07-29
A monumental assemblage of this antic author's short fiction, most of it steeped in the literary history and postmodernist contortions of "that peculiarly American species, the writer in the university." Each of the four collections gathered here has stories closely related by characters, themes, and stylistic high jinks, accommodating the preference Barth (Every Third Thought, 2011, etc.) notes in his introduction for the long form of the novel. They also reflect the writer's constant parsing and playing with narrative conventions in metafictional outings that began with the Borges-influenced, multilayered confections of his first collection, Lost in the Funhouse (1968). "Menelaiad," for tortuous instance, retells some of the Troy legend with mind-boggling embedding of multiple narrators like matryoshka dolls. On With the Story (1996) dials down the meta moments while including a Barth avatar who alludes to Funhouse. The story titled " ‘Waves,' by Amien Richard," is fairly straightforward as two travel writers seek a good snorkeling site while painfully avoiding a shared tragedy. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004) nods to all Barth's favorite tale-tellers—Homer, Scheherazade, and Boccaccio—while a writer named Graybard and his Muse discuss "narrative" in sections linking the book's actual narratives—including four pages that look like musical notations for a song containing the one word "help." That the 11 nights are those following the terrorist attacks on 9/11 shows Barth venturing out of the ivory ziggurat and contemplating a "nation in shock." More conventional are the stories of a Maryland gated community in 2008's The Development. They have a comic take on community and an intimate sense of aging—Barth was almost 80 at that time. Still, he can't resist his bookish japes, as with a writing student who presents one project in text written all over her young flesh. As part of Barth's challenging postmodernist corpus, the short stories offer smaller doses of the odd pleasures and strains of a restless intelligence and its relentless gaming of the literary system.

Kirkus Reviews