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Collected Stories
When John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Barth’s writing was not a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American literature at the time, it beckoned back to the founders of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and reflecting the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction. This collection of Barth’s short fiction is a landmark event, bringing together all of his previous collections with a few new stories. Its occasion helps readers assess a remarkable lifetime’s work and represents an important chapter in the history of American literature. Dalkey Archive will reissue a number of Barth’s novels over the next few years, permanently preserving his work for generations to come.
“There is no one writing today who has the resources of his imagination or the depth of his understanding about the nature of narrative.”—Richard Lehan, Los Angeles Times Book Review
John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland in 1930. He stands alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the giants of postwar American fiction. He is the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, and The Last Voyage of Somebody.
“There is no one writing today who has the resources of his imagination or the depth of his understanding about the nature of narrative.”—Richard Lehan, Los Angeles Times Book Review
John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland in 1930. He stands alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the giants of postwar American fiction. He is the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, and The Last Voyage of Somebody.
800 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2015
About the author
John Barth
79 books808 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 - 6 of 6 reviews
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December 22, 2015It's true. I didn't read this edition. What I read was a nice first/first of On With The Story, finding the release of this thoughtful collection a good excuse to finally revisit my very first Barth=encounter. Came out of nowhere back in the '90s when I didn't really know at all what was available to read, thinking I was interested in Vonnegut/Heller, The Russians, The Existentialists. I wasn't an avid reader back then. But Barth's pyrotechnics left an impression on me. Eventually I found The Sot=Weed Factor and down the rabbit hole I went.
Dalkey is doing a very nice thing for Barth, pub'ing nearly all of his work in fresh new editions (they've been curating his much=aligned LETTERS now for years). What we have in this collection is an assemblage of Barth's four assemblages of Short Works/Stories/Prose :: Lost in the Funhouse (a that without which kind of book), On With The Story, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories, and The Development (not to worry, I've read them all ; shine my Barth=Completionism badge on a weekly basis). The collection of the four is rather more like a heap than are the four individual collections themselves, all of which form a more or less coherent bookish unity/whole ; the collected stories being woven together with an additional interstitial narrative (exception being Funhouse which has a more dispersed unity) -- which interstitial narrative is what saves Ten Nights from being mostly a drag, makes On With The a delight! and is lacking in Development, its stories being already more or less contiguous. Barth works the long form more strongly than the short form, creating a larger work out of smaller stuff, as he indicates in his short Preface, the only original piece in this collection.
Recommended. And, well done Dalkey!
Dalkey is doing a very nice thing for Barth, pub'ing nearly all of his work in fresh new editions (they've been curating his much=aligned LETTERS now for years). What we have in this collection is an assemblage of Barth's four assemblages of Short Works/Stories/Prose :: Lost in the Funhouse (a that without which kind of book), On With The Story, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories, and The Development (not to worry, I've read them all ; shine my Barth=Completionism badge on a weekly basis). The collection of the four is rather more like a heap than are the four individual collections themselves, all of which form a more or less coherent bookish unity/whole ; the collected stories being woven together with an additional interstitial narrative (exception being Funhouse which has a more dispersed unity) -- which interstitial narrative is what saves Ten Nights from being mostly a drag, makes On With The a delight! and is lacking in Development, its stories being already more or less contiguous. Barth works the long form more strongly than the short form, creating a larger work out of smaller stuff, as he indicates in his short Preface, the only original piece in this collection.
Recommended. And, well done Dalkey!
Want to Read
November 10, 2015just got this in the mail today. hardcover too!
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November 14, 2017 I almost feel that it’s cheating to record reading this book as reading a new book, as there are no apparent changes to any of the stories therein. It is Barth’s four books of shorter fiction combined into one book of short fiction. At least for The Book of 10 Nights and A Night, and The Development, it’s only my second reading. Barth remains an enigma. I first encountered him in one of these pieces of short fiction – “Title,” from Lost in the Funhouse – and on the strength of that single story immediately bought all his novels that I could find—which, up to that point ended with The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. I have read all the novels, and all the short pieces, and even most of the essays, usually more than once. He’s been harder to find on local bookshelves since Once Upon a Time, but with the aid of the MUN library I’ve managed to keep up. Sometimes I find his playfulness, his metafictional conceits absolutely annoying; sometimes I find themencouraging. I’ve been reading John Barth since 1993, and I still don’t know what to make of him.
May 17, 2026
Of the four books in this volume I had only read Lost in the Funhouse before. My first read largely matches my second time through: mixed feelings. The first half of Lost in the Funhouse made me think I was in for a serious reevaluation of this work, with the titular story at around the halfway mark being my favorite. Unfortunately, my enjoyment waned considerably after that. Many of the stories here are a bit too dedicated to being clever in some technical way, leading me to think this was a lot more fun for Barth to plan than it was for me to read. The house just wasn't that fun for me, despite the undeniable ambition and technical bravado. "[T]he necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible." Well, I felt that imperfection of observation in myself while reading most of these.
On With the Story was a step up from Funhouse for me. Here too, we get Barth's breaking down the mechanics storytelling, but I found the stories and framing device to work well. The couple discussing the stories created what felt like a more cohesive work—not that a short story collection needs to be cohesive, but I found the cohesion helped make the meta aspects flow more and not feel so jarring (or downright obnoxious)—especially with the commentary on the twelve stories forming not only a means of cohesion but critique on the methods involved. The idea and technique of "Ad Infinitum: A Short Story" was one of my favorites here. It's about a phone call with undefined bad news that a wife is going to deliver to her husband. It's a mere journey across their yard, but Barth utilizes the concept of Zeno's paradox to break the journey down into an insurmountable event of infinities. There's also a playfulness, and a clarity I found intoxicating, such as where it's noted that, "To stroll leisurely even to the Zumi crab apple takes ten or a dozen seconds—about a long as it takes to read this sentence aloud." Now that is entertaining to read! To find the very act of reading being a measure against what is happening in the story.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night was probably my favorite of the four books collected here. Maybe part of why I liked it is that I experienced September 11th and the aftermath (as in I was alive and aware, not that I was there). Using Boccaccio's Decameron as a sort of model, this follows the muse, Wysiwyg, and author, Graybard, hoping to distract themselves from the horror of the attack and chaos that followed. "So what we'd like to believe...Is that to tell irrelevant stories in grim circumstances is not only permissible, but sometimes therapeutic. That their very irrelevance to the frame-situation may be what matters." Each night the author tells a story, and the muse will occasionally place a request as to the nature or focus of the story. There's a moment about halfway in where Wysiwyg requests no more tales involving marital infidelity, just as I was starting to feel it was a repetitious aspect of the stories. It was funny to have my readerly thought advanced by the muse of these tales right after I started thinking it. My favorite story here was "9999" which was a depiction of finding meaning in meaninglessness, heading to an emotionally overwhelming conclusion that made me think about my life, my girlfriend, growing old, and inevitable death.
The idea of The Development was fun, and I liked some of these stories all right, but I felt underwhelmed with the closing book collected in this volume. Each story follows a couple in a housing development. While the first story, "Peeping Tom" gave me some hope, there's a sense of blandness to the stories as Barth gives little of substance to differentiate the couples. I suppose that's part of what's at work here, a critique of these communities that are so uniform that the word "development" functions as a critique of the homogeneity.
Your mileage may vary here. Lost in the Funhouse was my first Barth, and despite it not doing much for me, I gave The Sot-Weed Factor a read and absolutely loved it. That might be a too-high bar I set on Barth or he set on himself. I look forward to reading more of Barth's novels, which I have a fair number of waiting on my shelves...
On With the Story was a step up from Funhouse for me. Here too, we get Barth's breaking down the mechanics storytelling, but I found the stories and framing device to work well. The couple discussing the stories created what felt like a more cohesive work—not that a short story collection needs to be cohesive, but I found the cohesion helped make the meta aspects flow more and not feel so jarring (or downright obnoxious)—especially with the commentary on the twelve stories forming not only a means of cohesion but critique on the methods involved. The idea and technique of "Ad Infinitum: A Short Story" was one of my favorites here. It's about a phone call with undefined bad news that a wife is going to deliver to her husband. It's a mere journey across their yard, but Barth utilizes the concept of Zeno's paradox to break the journey down into an insurmountable event of infinities. There's also a playfulness, and a clarity I found intoxicating, such as where it's noted that, "To stroll leisurely even to the Zumi crab apple takes ten or a dozen seconds—about a long as it takes to read this sentence aloud." Now that is entertaining to read! To find the very act of reading being a measure against what is happening in the story.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night was probably my favorite of the four books collected here. Maybe part of why I liked it is that I experienced September 11th and the aftermath (as in I was alive and aware, not that I was there). Using Boccaccio's Decameron as a sort of model, this follows the muse, Wysiwyg, and author, Graybard, hoping to distract themselves from the horror of the attack and chaos that followed. "So what we'd like to believe...Is that to tell irrelevant stories in grim circumstances is not only permissible, but sometimes therapeutic. That their very irrelevance to the frame-situation may be what matters." Each night the author tells a story, and the muse will occasionally place a request as to the nature or focus of the story. There's a moment about halfway in where Wysiwyg requests no more tales involving marital infidelity, just as I was starting to feel it was a repetitious aspect of the stories. It was funny to have my readerly thought advanced by the muse of these tales right after I started thinking it. My favorite story here was "9999" which was a depiction of finding meaning in meaninglessness, heading to an emotionally overwhelming conclusion that made me think about my life, my girlfriend, growing old, and inevitable death.
The idea of The Development was fun, and I liked some of these stories all right, but I felt underwhelmed with the closing book collected in this volume. Each story follows a couple in a housing development. While the first story, "Peeping Tom" gave me some hope, there's a sense of blandness to the stories as Barth gives little of substance to differentiate the couples. I suppose that's part of what's at work here, a critique of these communities that are so uniform that the word "development" functions as a critique of the homogeneity.
Your mileage may vary here. Lost in the Funhouse was my first Barth, and despite it not doing much for me, I gave The Sot-Weed Factor a read and absolutely loved it. That might be a too-high bar I set on Barth or he set on himself. I look forward to reading more of Barth's novels, which I have a fair number of waiting on my shelves...
October 27, 2020
Barth is a master of postmodern fiction, and having all of his short stories together in one place only cements that reputation. Though each collection’s tales are interconnected in some way, his mastery of construction and form is readily apparent in each individual story.
July 30, 2023
Just struck me as so dated, even though I enjoyed my short story classes back when....
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews