books in order

John Barth Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Floating Opera (1956)
  2. The End of the Road (1958)
  3. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
  4. Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
  5. Chimera (1972)
  6. Letters (1979)
  7. Sabbatical (1982)
  8. The Tidewater Tales (1987)
  9. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
  10. Once Upon a Time (1994)
  11. Coming Soon! (2001)
  12. The Development (2008)
  13. Every Third Thought (2011)

Collections

  1. Lost in the Fun-House (1968)
  2. Floating Opera and the End of the Road (1988)
  3. On With the Story (1996)
  4. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004)
  5. Where Three Roads Meet (2005)
  6. Collected Stories (2015)

Non fiction

  1. The Friday Book (1984)
  2. Further Fridays (1987)
  3. Final Fridays (2012)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

John Barth Books Overview

The Sot-Weed Factor

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’ Time .

Giles Goat-Boy

In this outrageously farcical adventure, hero George Giles sets out to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant ‘fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex’ Time.

Chimera

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 tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.

Letters

A landmark of postmodern American fiction, Letters is as the subtitle genially informs us ‘an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual.’ Seven characters including the Author himself exchange a novel’s worth of Letters during a 7 month period in 1969, a time of revolution that recalls the U.S.’s first revolution in the 18th century the heyday of the epistolary novel. Recapitulating American history as well as the plots of his first six novels, Barth’s seventh novel is a witty and profound exploration of the nature of revolution and renewal, rebellion and reenactment, at both the private and public levels. It is also an ingenious meditation on the genre of the novel itself, recycling an older form to explore new directions, new possibilities for the novel.

Sabbatical

a novel subtitled ‘a romance’

The Tidewater Tales

‘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. Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, they tell each other tales to break the writer’s block handed Peter by his Muse, to ease the weight of Katherine’s pregnancy, to entertain, and to enlighten. Along with their stories, we learn of the Bay itself past and present. The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

National Book Award winner John Barth offers a rambunctious story full of narrative high jinks in this lively, inventive epic. Journalist Simon Behler finds himself in the house of Sinbad the Sailor after being washed ashore during a seagoing adventure. Over the course of six evenings, the two take turns recounting their voyages, merging medieval Baghdad and twentieth century Maryland in a brilliantly entertaining weave of stories within stories.

Once Upon a Time

A master novelist, with characteristic verve and playful flourishes, presents his life, staged as a sort of operatic cruise through memory, desire, vocation, and that life’s adventures, despairs, loves, marriages, selves, and counterselves.Tour.

Coming Soon!

In a novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth, the dean of postmodern fiction, spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed in the wake of his literary trailblazing. Barth’s first novel in ten years, 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. Inspired by a gently sinking showboat replica called The Original Floating Opera II, grounded on a shoal somewhere in Chesapeake Bay as a hurricane and Y2K approaches, they race each other to write a novel about a floating opera a reprise of the fictional mentor’s first novel, of Barth’s own first novel, of Edna Ferber’s literary monument Show Boat and its spawn of musicals and films. 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. At a time of intense renewed interest in postmodernism, Coming Soon!!! spotlights its legacy with the wit and irreverence that mark Barth as one of our most highly regarded writers. It is an extraordinary addition to, and a playful riff on, Barth’s oeuvre, a series of books that have shaped contemporary literature.

The Development

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 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 toga party to marital infidelities, a baffling suicide pact, and the sudden, apocalyptic destruction of the short lived development, Barth brings mordant humor and compassion to the lives of characters we all know well. From one of the most prodigally gifted comic novelists writing in English today Newsweek, The Development is John Barth at his most accessible and sympathetic best.

Lost in the Fun-House

Barth’s lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

Floating Opera and the End of the Road

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.

On With the Story

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.

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night offers both a keen introduction to the genius of John Barth and a deeply human argument for the enduring value of literature. Gathering stories written throughout this postmodern master’s long career, the collection spans his entire range of styles, from straightforward narrative to experimental metafiction. In the time immediately following September 11, 2001, the veteran writer Graybard spends eleven nights with a nubile muse named WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get. The two lovers debate the meaning and relevance of writing and storytelling in the wake of disaster, telling a new tale each night in the tradition of Scheherazade. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night exhibits the thrilling blend of playfulness and illuminating insight that have marked Barth as one of America’s most distinguished writers.

Where Three Roads Meet

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 again that Barth is ‘one of the best we have when it comes to getting to the heart of the story’ Rocky Mountain News.

The Friday Book

‘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…
A reader leaves The Friday Book feeling intellectually fuller, verbally more adept, mentally stimulated, with algebra and fire of his own.’ Washington PostBarth’s first work of nonfiction is what he calls ‘an arrangement of essays and occasional lectures, some previously published, most not, most on matters literary, some not, accumulated over thirty years or so of writing, teaching, and teaching writing.’ With the full measure of playfulness and erudition that he brings to his novels, Barth glances into his crystal ball to speculate on the future of literature and the literature of the future. He also looks back upon historical fiction and fictitious history and discusses prose, poetry, and all manner of letters: ‘Real letters, forged letters, doctored letters…
and of course alphabetical letters, the atoms of which the universe of print is made.”The pieces brought together in The Friday Book reflect Mr. Barth’s witty, playful, and engaging personality…
They are lively, sometimes casual, and often whimsical a delight to the reader, to whom Mr. Barth seems to be writing or speaking as a learned friend.’ Kansas City Star’No less than Barth’s fiction these pieces are performances, agile, dexterous, robust, offering the cerebral delights of playful lucidity.’ Richmond News Leader

Related Authors