{"title":"John Barth","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"where-three-roads-meet","title":"Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom the acclaimed John Barth, \"one of the greatest novelists of our time\" (Washington Post Book World) and \"a master of language\" (Chicago Sun-Times), comes a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first novella, \"Tell Me,\" explores a callow undergraduate's initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second novella, \"I've Been Told,\" traces no less than the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of the third novella, \"As I Was Saying . . . ,\" record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicings of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth's deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet will surely delight loyal fans and draw new ones.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Teller, tale, torrid . . . inspiration: Barth's seventeenth book brings these three narrative 'roads' together inimitably, and thrice. [Where Three Roads Meet] employs all of his familiar devices -- alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns -- to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate -- obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously -- a farewell to language and its objects: us.\" -- Publishers Weekly, starred review\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Barth","offers":[{"title":"Trade Paperback","offer_id":53146832142627,"sku":"9780618773428","price":11.16,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0930\/2258\/5123\/files\/9780618773428.jpg?v=1741137527"},{"product_id":"the-development","title":"The Development","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom one of our most celebrated masters, a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomething 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom 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” (\u003cem\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/em\u003e), \u003cem\u003eThe Development\u003c\/em\u003e is John Barth at his most accessible and sympathetic best.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Barth","offers":[{"title":"Trade Paperback","offer_id":53159294075171,"sku":"9780547394503","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0930\/2258\/5123\/files\/9780547394503.jpg?v=1741177083"},{"product_id":"coming-soon-a-narrative","title":"Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIn 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. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eComing 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Barth","offers":[{"title":"Trade Paperback","offer_id":53166155956515,"sku":"9780618257300","price":17.56,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0930\/2258\/5123\/files\/9780618257300.jpg?v=1741199001"}],"url":"https:\/\/epicreads.com\/collections\/john-barth.oembed","provider":"Epic Reads","version":"1.0","type":"link"}