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“... Offering a critical account of John Barth’s new book within the confines of a periodical review is like trying to haul a whale on board a fishing smack. For the sake of brevity, even my formal description of the work must be brutally oversimplified. It is an epistolary novel, divided into seven sections, one for every ‘letter’ of the title ...”

“... and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the ...”

“... and authority of his prose.If Raymond Carver ranks among the great American short-story writers, John Barth is a master of the out-sized Post-Modern novel. They belong at opposite poles of the American literary spectrum. In ‘On Writing’, Carver mentions an essay by Barth in which the latter regrets the lack of ...”

“... literary history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the ...”

“... prose writings are occasionally grouped with those of certain of his contemporaries – Barth, Coover, Vonnegut, Barthelme – under the rubric New Fiction. There is in Brautigan, as with the others, what Borges called ‘that measure of irrealism indispensable to art’; as with the others, too, a foregrounding of form and language, blurred ...”

“... fantasy of Joyce in Ulysses than with the free-wheeling American ‘put-on’, the extravagance of John Barth. But, as against repression and silencing, the book bubbles with talk and streams with consciousness – artfully enacting its theme. Two novels about witchcraft carry credentials. The Girl Green as Elderflower is based on medieval sources, which ...”

“... That John Updike has a Trollopian fidelity to his characters is evident from the four books of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure ...”

“... me that Buford’s tastes were formed at university in the USA during the late Seventies, when John Barth and long bad teachable literary books were all the rage. Buford had responded by going the other way.) Among the Thugs isn’t like that, however: it’s written in a loose, chatty, almost gossipy style that works very well during the book’s ...”

“... none is really among the writers associated with the more radical forms of ‘Post-Modernism’. John Fowles and Iris Murdoch are not discussed. Parrinder himself notes that ‘postmodernists such as Pynchon, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme’ are most usefully understood in relation to the revival of fantasy: but ...”

“... and Chekhov’. By this point, White was trying to get a deal to write a book of criticism on John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Donald Barthelme. The proposal was rejected. Though ‘crushed at the time’, White was later glad, because metafiction ‘no longer intrigues’ him ‘or anyone else’. It’s ‘the sort of ...”

“... fiction of Paley’s neighbour and good friend Donald Barthelme. The gargantuan mock-epics of John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, now little-read, were much praised at the time, and the ‘literature of exhaustion’ was the literature of the future – if there was a future for humanistic literature at all. Like a number of realist ...”

“... the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone.’ The most conspicuous absentee is probably John Barth, in whose work, from Chimera (1972), through The Tidewater Tales (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) and On with the Story (1996), The Arabian Nights are interbred with many other tall tales and shaggy-dog relations. More even ...”

“... the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of form, the moment of aesthetic revelation in the contingencies of life’. Bradbury is just going through the motions, hastening from name to name, reciting worn-out academic phrases, too bored even to ...”

“... It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars Andemening, the protagonist of her third novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), is an orphaned Swedish book ...”

“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in ...”