Description

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.

Trade Review
"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

Once Upon a Time – a Floating Opera

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    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Mon 29 Jun 2026.

    A Paperback by John Barth

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      View other formats and editions of Once Upon a Time – a Floating Opera by John Barth

      Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
      Publication Date: 18/12/2015
      ISBN13: 9781628971279, 978-1628971279
      ISBN10: 1628971274

      Description

      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.

      Trade Review
      "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

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