NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-wthin-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad,' and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidescope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.

A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The House of Asterion," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy -is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists - Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale -revealed to us in the "secret" journals of Capt. John Smith - that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time Magazine

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.

Barth's complex, controversial novels are interpreted, with reference to to recurring themes and attention to Barth criticism, to guide the intelligent reader through these virtuoso presentations of the narrative process.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

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.

From Edward P. Jones comes one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Edward P. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities. “A masterpiece that deserves a place in the American literary canon.”—Time