Collected Stories

When John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Barth’s writing was not a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American literature at the time, it beckoned back to the founders of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and reflecting the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction. This collection of Barth’s short fiction is a landmark event, bringing together all of his previous collections with a few new stories. Its occasion helps readers assess a remarkable lifetime’s work and represents an important chapter in the history of American literature. Dalkey Archive will reissue a number of Barth’s novels over the next few years, permanently preserving his work for generations to come.

“There is no one writing today who has the resources of his imagination or the depth of his understanding about the nature of narrative.”—Richard Lehan, Los Angeles Times Book Review

John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland in 1930. He stands alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the giants of postwar American fiction. He is the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, and The Last Voyage of Somebody.