John Barth

Using the venerable literary device of the bedtime story, which links fictions as different as The Arabian Nights and Charlotte's Web, John Barth ingeniously interweaves stories from an ongoing, high-spirited but deadly serious nocturnal game of tale-telling by a more or less desperate loving couple vacationing at their "last resort.". As Scheherazade spun out her bedtime stories to save her life, the narrator of On with the Story spins out his to postpone The End, and to explore en route - wittily, mournfully, tenderly - love in modern life and postmodern literature. As the narrative cycles through the lifescapes of his subjects' stories, Barth affords a view both panoramic and microscopic of our own landscape. With eye and pen both sharp and beautiful he depicts love ranging from the obsessively puppy through the sophisticatedly fatigued, the delusionally murderous, even the quantum-physical, to the superbly fulfilled.

"On Fridays, John Barth abandons life in the city and heads for his Chesapeake Bay retreat, where he duly exchanges his weekday fiction muse for a nonfiction one. Fridays have become a liberating time, Barth says, to "discover what I thought about some subject or other, before reconfronting the vacated ways and laying the keel for the next substantial fiction project." What emerges from these thoughtful adventures are witty essays, literary and otherwise, the tracks of an original and incisive mind." "Ten years ago Barth published his first nonfiction collection, The Friday Book, to critical acclaim. Now, in Further Fridays, his life's "cardinal pursuits" - writing, reading, thinking, and teaching - give rise to a luminous range of creative musings. Barth shifts easily between the humorous and the erudite; his imagination draws his from postmodern fiction and chaos theory to memory, the arabesque, and the nature of imagination itself." "Many of these ruminations, including his celebrated "It's a Long Story: Maximalism Reconsidered," have previously appeared in various periodicals. Others - whether in the form of essays, lectures, or addresses - are small masterpieces, never before published. Each is a journey, but never quite the one you expected."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of original fairy tales by ten science fiction and fantasy writers, including Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, and Anne McCaffrey.

Journalist Simon Behler finds himself in the house of Sinbad the Sailor after being washed ashore during a sea-going adventure. Over the course of six evenings, the two take turns recounting their voyages in a brilliantly entertaining weave of stories within stories.

Tells the stories of a man's struggle with the idea of suicide and of a bed-hopping threesome brought together by a strange doctor-psychiatrist-mentor.

As they cruise around Chesapeake Bay aboard their sailboat, Peter Sagamore and his very pregnant wife, Katherine, reveal the stories of their past and present.

Subtitled "a romance," Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature - part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allen Poe - and her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers, a direct descendant of the author of "The Star Spangled Banner" and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead. True to its subtitle, the novel combines the mysterious and marvelous (unexplained disappearances; a fabled sea monster in Chesapeake Bay) with romantic love and daring adventure.

George, also known as Billy Bockfuss and as Giles, was raised as a goat rather than as a boy by a brilliant atomic physicist whose guilt about the bomb has driven him to the country. George sets out to become the messianic Grand Tutor of a university and to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant 'fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex.'

A collection of 14 short stories.

Missing pages 60 to 61, can be viewed by clicking the link provided.

Manhattan’s sexy adults-only hotel is now a crime scene. And concierge Mia Traverse--self-described CSI addict--is on the case. Whether it’s hunting down extra-soft pillows for a fussy guest or tracking down a murderer, Mia loves solving a mystery. With her grapevine connections and her plucky determination, she knows she can be a big help to the hot detective in charge.With just a few months left on the force, Bax Milligan needs all the help he can get on this high-profile whodunit. But he hadn’t counted on vivacious, beautiful Mia becoming the Watson to his Holmes, reviving that old thrill of solving a crime...and triggering a few new thrills. Now the case isn’t the only thing he wants to put to bed....