An acclaimed author offers a witty collection of essays inspired by his Friday muse--the nonfiction one--and covers a variety of topics, from postmodern fiction and chaos theory to memory, imagination, and the arabesque.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Barth has often been called a postmodernist, and in these witty essays, many of which have appeared in various periodicals, he explores the hallmarks of the style?formal playfulness, narrative self-consciousness, self-reflexiveness, ironic recycling of premodern devices?in a host of writers from Laurence Sterne to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Barth charts his own creative evolution from the realism and minimalism of The Floating Opera to the high-energy extravagances of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy. He champions the terse minimalism of Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Frederick Barthelme and hurls ripostes at his critics, notably John Gardner and Tom Wolfe. A sequel to his first collection of essays, The Friday Book (1984), this miscellany includes a piece on the ecology and literature of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay region, a study of Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and an illustrated essay drawing parallels between postmodernism, literary arabesques and chaos theory.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Barth, author of several novels as well as the essays in The Friday Book, draws on his several years of writing and teaching experience to provide readers with flashes of insight into the writing of fiction. The witty, intelligent essays answer such questions about creative writing as, Can it be taught? Can it be learned? and Should it be taught? with clever, anecdotal insider wisdom. Often referring to his own teaching, writing, and traveling, Barth also ruminates on the writing process, the history of writing, authors, and other aspects of the trade. Barth's wealth of experience, ready wit, and skillful writing make this important work interesting and enjoyable. Kathleen Hughes
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
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Intellectual Wanderings with a Friend,
By A Customer
This review is from: Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984 - 1994 (Paperback)
Think post-modernism is something for stuffy literature professors? Think again. Among the more than twenty essays that John Barth tackles, none is more enlightening than his exhoneration of the most maligned literary term of the decade. Barth addresses his essay to a well-read audience and convinces us that regular-guy readers can enjoy post-modern literature as surely as Persians enjoy "The Arabian Nights." He takes the postition that the label of post-modernism is just that, a label, and that it's practitioners (himself among the vanguard) are members of a generation that can no longer pressume their audiences are naive--twentieth century readers know archetypes and plot devices when they see them. Barth does not, however, try to convince the reader to embrace post-modernism; rather, he simply explains it as he understands it.
With a similarly laid-back, take-me-as-I-am tone, Barth tells of how he met his wife, how he learned to write, what he thinks imagination is, and what the virtues and vices of short stories are, among numerous other topics. Also included in this, his second volume of "Friday" essays (named for the day of the week in which he takes a sabatical from teaching), are the prefaces to four of his most popular works.
This is an enjoyable intellectual feast for anyone interested in the writer's art--even if you didn't major in English.
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