Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas
John Barth
Dec 2006 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Ebook
180
Pages
About this ebook
From the National Book Award winner, three linked novellas that “will stretch your mind, challenge your thoughts, and bend your reality” (Charlotte Observer).
John Barth, “one of the greatest novelists of our time” (Washington Post Book World) and “the master of experimental fiction” (Details), presents a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.
The first novella, “Tell Me,” explores a callow undergraduate’s initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second, “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 “As I Was Saying . . . ” record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicing of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.
Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth’s deep intelligence and playful irreverence, 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).
“Barth is markedly intelligent about language and often very funny.” —The New York Times
“Perhaps the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today.” —Newsweek
John Barth, “one of the greatest novelists of our time” (Washington Post Book World) and “the master of experimental fiction” (Details), presents a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.
The first novella, “Tell Me,” explores a callow undergraduate’s initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second, “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 “As I Was Saying . . . ” record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicing of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.
Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth’s deep intelligence and playful irreverence, 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).
“Barth is markedly intelligent about language and often very funny.” —The New York Times
“Perhaps the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today.” —Newsweek
About the author
JOHN BARTH’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. For many years he taught in the writing seminars at John Hopkins University. He is the author of such seminal works as The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera (for which he won the NBA), and Giles Goat-Boy.
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