The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories [Hardcover]

John Barth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2004

John Barth, the postmodern master, is back with his sixteenth book and third collection of stories, which gathers for the first time in one volume stories previously published in various journals. Exploring ideas of narrative frames, stories within stories, and the uncanny power that language has in our lives, he offers the thrilling blend of playfulness and illuminating insight that has marked him as one of America’s most distinguished writers.
Here are tales of aging, time, possibility, and relationships. And in typically Barthian fashion, they are framed by the narration of a veteran writer, Graybard, and his flirtatious, insouciant muse, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). During the eleven days that follow September 11, 2001, Graybard and WYSIWYG debate the meaning and relevance of writing and storytelling in the wake of disaster, or TEOTWAW(A)KI— The End Of The World As We (Americans) Know It.
The Book of Ten Nights and a Night is vintage Barth, sure to appeal to his loyal fans and find new readers touched by his irreverent but deeply human perspective on how writers can respond to the emotional and ethical demands of tragic events.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Barth's latest collection, one of his stand-ins, C.P. Mason, a writer/teacher who is trying to fit a whole short story around a sentence he remembers from a dream, remarks: "Has any storyteller, from Homer to Hemingway, Poe to Pasternak, attempted to fabricate a narrative something out of so nearly nothing?" Such minimalist flourishes are not what one would expect from the former creator of gargantuan metafictions. Barth calls this collection a Hendecameron, and refers to both The Arabian Nights (which he pillaged to better effect in Chimera) and the Decameron. Instead of the plague from which Boccaccio's narrators have fled, Barth's stories are told over 11 days that include and succeed 9/11. The intervals between stories are filled with a lot of cutesy converse- and asterisk-laden copulation between a Barth stand-in-Graybard-and his muse, Wysiwyg (Barth, one of nature's true acronym maniacs, got the name Wysiwyg from computer slang-it stands for "What you see is what you get"). The stories themselves proliferate with other Barth stand-ins-retired professors who are writers or retired writers who are professors-and smart, sexy, Wysiwygish women. The few bright spots in an otherwise dismal bunch include the first night, a strongly written fragmentary description of the retirement of a Chesapeake Bay boatman, Capt. Claude Morgan, the oldest story here; the 11th night, which is Wysiwyg's story; and an interesting theme story on the universe as a shrinking mass, paralleling the human aging process, "The Big Shrink." The rest are filled with the gaseous, colorless chitchat characteristic of Barth's late style. Distressingly, Barth's inversion of the old writer's adage, "show, don't tell," has led him to a garrulous abyss: he tells and tells, but has nothing to show, leaving the reader with no reason to read him.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Barth, a National Book Award-winning master of metafiction, presents a set of short stories that gently parodies A Thousand and One Nights. Amusingly enough, his Scheherazade is a writer calling himself Graybard, and his task is to meet the exacting standards of his exhibitionist and sea-loving muse, Wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get). She shows up wet and seemingly naked each evening around cocktail hour to hear a story, but these are not just any nights: these are the nights immediately following September 11, 2001, prompting Barth to reflect on the kinds of stories we tell ourselves in the wake of world-altering tragedies. Yet Graybard's antic, self-reflective tales focus not on world events but rather on lust, marriage, family, age, and the added dimensions that dreams, fantasies, and fiction bring to life. A vacationing couple finds a wedding ring on the ocean floor, a computer's date default turns back to 1956, a teenager declares her intention to remain child free. For all his narrative-interrupting commentary, Barth can't help but be a magnetic storyteller. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (April 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618405666
• ISBN-13: 978-0618405664
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,485,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.