Final Fridays
Published on 10. April 2012
256 pages
978-1-61902-087-0 (ISBN)
Description
For decades, acclaimed author John Barth has strayed from his Monday-through-Thursday-morning routine of fiction-writing and dedicated Friday mornings to the muse of nonfiction. The result is Final Fridays, his third essay collection, following The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995). Sixteen years and six novels since his last volume of non-fiction, Barth delivers yet another remarkable work comprised of 27 insightful essays.
With pieces covering everything from reading, writing, and the state of the art, to tributes to writer-friends and family members, this collection is witty and engaging throughout. Barth's "unaffected love of learning” (San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle) and "joy in thinking that becomes contagious” (Washington Post), shine through in this third, and, with an implied question mark, final essay collection.
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Person
John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and attended Johns Hopkins University before writing his celebrated first novel, The Floating Opera, in 1956. Since then, he has produced more than fifteen collections of short stories, essays, and novels that have won prestigious accolades, including the National Book Award and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. He divides his time between Maryland and Florida.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acnowledgments
- Foreword: To the Hyphen, and Beyond
- I. ON READING, WRITING, AND THE STATE OF THE ART
- Keats's Fears, Etc.
- The State of the Art
- Two More Forewords
- In the Beginning": The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox
- How it Was, Maybe: A Novelist Looks Back on Life in Early-Colonial Virginia and Maryland
- Further Questions?
- Incremental Perturbation
- The Parallels!": Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
- My Faulkner
- ¿Cien Años de Qué?
- A Window at the Pratt
- On Readings
- The End of the Word As We've Known It?
- "I've Lost My Place!"
- The Place of "Place" in Fiction
- Liberal Education: The Tragic View
- The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American
- All Trees Are Oak Trees. . .": Introductions to Literature
- The Inkstained Thumb
- Future Imperfect
- I.
- In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. . .
- The Morning After
- It Can Be Arranged: A Novelist Recalls His Jazz-Drumming Youth
- The End? On Writing No Further Fiction, Probably
- II. TRIBUTES AND MEMORIA
- Introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
- The Passion Artist (tribute to John Hawkes)
- The Accidental Mentor (Homage to Leslie Fiedler)
- As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy" (80th Birthday Salute to William H. Gass)
- The Last Introduction (memorial tribute to Joseph Heller)
- Remembering John Updike
- The Judge's Jokes: Souvenirs of My Father, the After-Banquet Speaker
- Eulogy For Jill
- Notes
