Once Upon a Time - A Floating Opera - (American Literature) by John Barth (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published by Little, Brown & Company in 1994"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

John Barth, a moderately successful novelist just turned sixty, decides to take a sail on Chesapeake Bay with his wife, but a tropical storm forces them deep into the Maryland tidal marshes. Lost, Barth takes out his dinghy to search for a way home, but becomes embarked instead on a quest through the murkier regions of his own memory--a semi-memoir, staged as an operatic cruise through desire, vocation, despair, love, marriage, selves, and counterselves.

Review Quotes

"A celebration of the power of narrative, of the questions it must ask and can answer.... [It is] brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, bursting with life, profound in its understanding, bawdy and funny, and comic in the wisest and best sense of the word." --New York Times

About the Author

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, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and the National Book Award winner Chimera.