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Postscripts
Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay—“jeux d’esprits,” as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth’s literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.
- GenresNonfiction
154 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 2022
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42 people want to read
About the author
John Barth
76 books793 followersJohn Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed
The Shirt of Nessus
, a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 24, 2022
I really thought we’d heard John Barth’s last with Every Third Thought. So I was surprised (and glad) to see this. He must have thought the same, since he called it Postscripts.
Barth is now in his nineties but, at least through the writing of this book, he’s keeping to his daily discipline of morning writing, with Fridays dedicated to reflection and rumination of the sort gathered here. This belongs with the probably unplanned trilogy: The Friday Book, Further Fridays, and Final Fridays. Like any good trilogy, it had to have a part four.
It reads like a selective memoir, with often very short essays on whatever occurred to Barth to write about. Some are memories, some are flights of attention deficit, some are accounts of events or of talks given by Barth throughout his life. There is even his recall of a dream.
All in all, you’re going to enjoy this if you’re a Barth fan. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is new to his writing — nothing would seem significant, and much self-parody and so on would be lost to the wind.
Barth names his four main influences, or “navigation-stars”: Homer’s Odysseus, the Arabian Night’s heroine Scheherazade, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s interesting that he picks out not just authors or even particular works, but characters in those works. Scheherazade especially stands out as such a major influence on Barth’s own style — where the telling of the story is part of the story itself, something repeated and pushed close to if not over the limit in some of Barth’s writings. Scheherazade is woven throughout the essays here, just because her character is so woven into Barth himself.
And we get Barth’s views on some of his contemporaries, including Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme (both held in high regard as friends as well as fellow writers).
There is also the irresistible Barthian compulsion to make fun of language, like talking of his WWII veteran brother Bill (“G.I. Bill”) taking advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend college, or fashioning a sort-of-story called “This is Not a Story,” inspired by Magritte’s “Ceci n'est pas une pipe.”
Barth is nothing if not self-conscious, and this at times is his self-consciousness running completely free.
He makes fun of himself, for example, as the author of the notorious möbius strip “short story” in Lost in the Funhouse, “Once Upon a Time There Was a Story That Began.” If you follow Barth’s directions, to cut the title out and connect its corners as he says, you get an actual möbius strip that bends the title into a self-referential infinite loop.
That kind of stuff had its day, and Barth, despite his insistence that he is just a story-teller, has always been an experimentalist. Some of it worked and some of it, at least to me, was just freakin’ tedious.
As he says here, “Nobody in her/his right mind will put up with this meta-crap much longer, so let’s give it one last try . . . “ So he does.
I’m not going to give the book 5 stars, just because I just couldn’t recommend it as a stand-alone work, especially to someone not that familiar with Barth’s writing. For readers who have followed Barth since The Floating Opera and the other early novels, it’s kind of weirdly indispensable.
Barth is now in his nineties but, at least through the writing of this book, he’s keeping to his daily discipline of morning writing, with Fridays dedicated to reflection and rumination of the sort gathered here. This belongs with the probably unplanned trilogy: The Friday Book, Further Fridays, and Final Fridays. Like any good trilogy, it had to have a part four.
It reads like a selective memoir, with often very short essays on whatever occurred to Barth to write about. Some are memories, some are flights of attention deficit, some are accounts of events or of talks given by Barth throughout his life. There is even his recall of a dream.
All in all, you’re going to enjoy this if you’re a Barth fan. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is new to his writing — nothing would seem significant, and much self-parody and so on would be lost to the wind.
Barth names his four main influences, or “navigation-stars”: Homer’s Odysseus, the Arabian Night’s heroine Scheherazade, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s interesting that he picks out not just authors or even particular works, but characters in those works. Scheherazade especially stands out as such a major influence on Barth’s own style — where the telling of the story is part of the story itself, something repeated and pushed close to if not over the limit in some of Barth’s writings. Scheherazade is woven throughout the essays here, just because her character is so woven into Barth himself.
And we get Barth’s views on some of his contemporaries, including Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme (both held in high regard as friends as well as fellow writers).
There is also the irresistible Barthian compulsion to make fun of language, like talking of his WWII veteran brother Bill (“G.I. Bill”) taking advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend college, or fashioning a sort-of-story called “This is Not a Story,” inspired by Magritte’s “Ceci n'est pas une pipe.”
Barth is nothing if not self-conscious, and this at times is his self-consciousness running completely free.
He makes fun of himself, for example, as the author of the notorious möbius strip “short story” in Lost in the Funhouse, “Once Upon a Time There Was a Story That Began.” If you follow Barth’s directions, to cut the title out and connect its corners as he says, you get an actual möbius strip that bends the title into a self-referential infinite loop.
That kind of stuff had its day, and Barth, despite his insistence that he is just a story-teller, has always been an experimentalist. Some of it worked and some of it, at least to me, was just freakin’ tedious.
As he says here, “Nobody in her/his right mind will put up with this meta-crap much longer, so let’s give it one last try . . . “ So he does.
I’m not going to give the book 5 stars, just because I just couldn’t recommend it as a stand-alone work, especially to someone not that familiar with Barth’s writing. For readers who have followed Barth since The Floating Opera and the other early novels, it’s kind of weirdly indispensable.
November 28, 2022
I’ve had so much fun reading these bitesized postscripts. There is so much love for literature and life in this bundle of sweet desserts. A lot of these have the same power as poetry has to say very truthful things about what it means to be a human being, and Barth is a master of mixing cultural references, blend high literature with dick jokes and pour it all in a delicious style and hit you right in the existential noggin.
July 21, 2023
There’s nothing truly stellar in here, but it’s so nice to spend time with an author who has meant as much to me as John Barth one last time. The mythology and pyrotechnics are gone, all that’s left are gated elderly communities for the snowbirds and garden center sales. Was nearly moved to tears by the short entry (they’re all short) wherein Barth bids adieu to his two fountain pens with which he has composed for decades. Few writers get to go out on their own terms like this, really a gift. Ciao, bello
March 9, 2023
If any one person is responsible for my love of reading and writing, it is John Barth.
After “discovering” The Floating Opera in 1984 while living in Rome, I backtracked over his oeuvre from 1956 to present, looking forward all the time to each new set of sentences he would set free.
“Postscripts” does not disappoint. It is Barth’s insuppressible voice, the one which has influenced me the most, that gives the most pleasure in this volume. I especially liked to entry called “This is Not a Story” (which it wasn’t).
If this be his final book, its appearance was a happy surprise for me and a brilliant, witty, insightful, and joyful command performance. Thank you John Barth, and thank your Muses for me.
After “discovering” The Floating Opera in 1984 while living in Rome, I backtracked over his oeuvre from 1956 to present, looking forward all the time to each new set of sentences he would set free.
“Postscripts” does not disappoint. It is Barth’s insuppressible voice, the one which has influenced me the most, that gives the most pleasure in this volume. I especially liked to entry called “This is Not a Story” (which it wasn’t).
If this be his final book, its appearance was a happy surprise for me and a brilliant, witty, insightful, and joyful command performance. Thank you John Barth, and thank your Muses for me.
January 21, 2024
Maybe closer to 2.5-2.75... but, y'know, benefit-of-the-doubt.
Some juicy tidbits in here, but mostly odds-and-ends. I particularly liked Libraries, Barth's address for the opening of an Alaskan library.
...I particularly disliked having to imagine Barth skinny dipping in an essay, or two.
Some juicy tidbits in here, but mostly odds-and-ends. I particularly liked Libraries, Barth's address for the opening of an Alaskan library.
...I particularly disliked having to imagine Barth skinny dipping in an essay, or two.
April 3, 2024
decided to read this today on hearing of barth's death. a set of pleasant little fripperies with few of the fierce pleasures of his finest fiction, but nice to see he was still sorting his thoughts on some of his favourite themes, he hadn't settled into senile immutability. rip barth, so long and thanks for all the prose
December 23, 2022
Charming
3.5
3.5
April 22, 2023
I enjoyed it, but this is for Barth completists only.
September 20, 2023
Essays by The GOAT of American post modern fiction
Still an amazing craftsman of language
Still an amazing craftsman of language
October 15, 2025
Kind of a waste of time...
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews