Lost in the Funhouse

by John Barth

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385240871
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/1988
Series:	Anchor Literary Library Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	144,100
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.19(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

John Barth (1930-2024) was an American writer celebrated for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera, was published in 1956, followed by The End of the Road. Barth achieved critical and commercial success in the 1960s with The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. His collection of interconnected stories, Lost in the Funhouse, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1969. His other works include Chimera, a collection of three novellas that won the National Book Award in 1973; Letters, an epistolary novel; Sabbatical: A Romance; and The Friday Book, a collection of essays.

Editorial Reviews

[Barth’s] style [is] one of the most plastic and delightful in American writing. . . . Almost helplessly he writes a story even when he is squirming like Houdini to transmute form into as strange a permutation as he can. His real interest is in the reader and in the metaphysical plight of imagination engaging with imagination.” —The New York Times

"Barth] crafted labyrinthine, fantastical tales that were at once bawdy and philosophical, placing him on the cutting edge of the postmodern literary movement." —The Washington Post

“[A] playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction.” —The Guardian

From the Publisher