The year is 2045 and a well respected newspaper columnist, David Cohen, is offered a once in a lifetime assignment. David is accustomed to his somewhat mundane lifestyle, and suddenly finds himself in unfamiliar territory and danger. David is desperate to uncover the secrets of Northland. This segregated city was built within the U.S borders and its policy is "White Christians Only." The leaders of Northland legally circumvented the laws to build their city in the heart of America. A hand picked group of media and journalists from outside of Northland were invited to this city to interview its people and leaders and report to the world the truth about this well guarded city. For years the people of the United States have come to believe that Northland and its leaders have other plans that could change the way they live, and alter their lifestyles. David, with the help of his assistant Connie, must obtain the proof he needs before he can write his story. David unexpectedly finds himself falling for Connie and struggles to keep his focus. Will other areas and other groups of people now living in the United States follow the same path as the city of Northland, or can we break the bigotry that has always existed in America?

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.

Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers.

So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain.

Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, "Her Book"Steve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, "Zorro"Glenn Blake from Drowned Moon, "Marsh"Jennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, "Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon Johnson"Richard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, "Bodysurfing"Avery Chenoweth from Wingtips, "Powerman"Guy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg"Tristan Davies from Cake, "Counterfactuals"Stephen Dixon from Time to Go, "Time to Go"Judith Grossman from How Aliens Think, "Rovera"Josephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, "On the Island"Greg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, "Hemingway's Cats"Jerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, "Basepaths"Michael Martone from Safety Patrol, "Safety Patrol"Jack Matthews from Crazy Women, "Haunted by Name Our Ignorant Lips"Jean McGarry from Dream Date, "The Last Time"Robert Nichols from In the Air, "Six Ways of Looking at Farming"Joe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, "West Baltimore"Frances Sherwood from EverythingYou've Heard Is True, "History"Robley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, "Hard Times"

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." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel—think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy—is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late seventeenth century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists—Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale—revealed to us in the 'secret' journals of Capt. John Smith—that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time

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 all of his previous collections together in one volume for the first time. 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, preserving his work for generations to come.

Volume Two in a collection of tales representing distinctive genres--from fairy tales to erotica--reveals the customs and societies in the medieval Middle East, as told by the mythic Sheherazade. Includes a new Introduction. Revised reissue.

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.

John Barth stays true to form in Every Third Thought, written from the perspective of a character Barth introduced in his short story collection The Development.
George I. Newett and his wife Amanda Todd lived in the gated community of Heron Bay Estates until its destruction by a fluke tornado. This event, Newett notes, occurred on the 77th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, a detail that would appear insignificant if it were not for several subsequent events.
The stress of the tornado's devastation prompts the Newett-Todds to depart on a European vacation, during which George suffers a fall on none other than his 77th birthday, the first day of autumn (or more cryptically, fall). Following this coincidence, George experiences the first of what is to become five serial visions, each appearing to him on the first day of the ensuing seasons, and each corresponding to a pivotal event in that season of his life.
As the novel unfolds, so do these uncanny coincidences, and it is clear that, as ever, Barth possesses an unmatched talent in balancing his characteristic style and wit with vivid, page-turning storytelling.

"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.

The year is 2045 and a well respected newspaper columnist, David Cohen, is offered a once in a lifetime assignment. David is accustomed to his somewhat mundane lifestyle, and suddenly finds himself in unfamiliar territory and danger. David is desperate to uncover the secrets of Northland. This segregated city was built within the U.S borders and its policy is "White Christians Only." The leaders of Northland legally circumvented the laws to build their city in the heart of America. A hand picked group of media and journalists from outside of Northland were invited to this city to interview its people and leaders and report to the world the truth about this well guarded city. For years the people of the United States have come to believe that Northland and its leaders have other plans that could change the way they live, and alter their lifestyles. David, with the help of his assistant Connie, must obtain the proof he needs before he can write his story. David unexpectedly finds himself falling for Connie and struggles to keep his focus. Will other areas and other groups of people now living in the United States follow the same path as the city of Northland, or can we break the bigotry that has always existed in America?

When Donald Barthelme died at the age of 54, he was perhaps the most imitated (if not emulated) practitioner of American literature. Caustic, slyly observant, transgressive, verbally scintillating, Barthelme's essays, stories, and novels redefined a generation of American letters and remain unparalleled for the way they capture our national pastimes and obsessions, but most of all for the way they caputure the strangeness of life.
Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

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).

A National Book Award winner, this bawdy, comic trio of novellas finds John Barth injecting his signature wit into three tales many times told: that of Scheherazade, storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights; of Perseus, slayer of Medusa; and of Bellerophon, rider of Pegasus and slayer of the Chimera.

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.

John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory-a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves.