You can also read responses to his essay by Colum McCann, A.L. Kennedy, Andrew Miller, Edmund White and John Banville, here.
Photograph by Pumiceous
John Barth discusses discovering William Faulkner and Lawrence Sterne as a student, the parallels between writing and arranging music, what happened to postmodernism and waiting for the muse to call.
You can also read responses to his essay by Colum McCann, A.L. Kennedy, Andrew Miller, Edmund White and John Banville, here.
Photograph by Pumiceous
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
John Barth’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His novels include The Floating Opera (1956), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and The Tidewater Tales (1987). His collections of short stories include Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and On with the Story (1996). His most recent novel is Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011).
More about the author →'I suggest he put aside all his writing rituals and that he give away all his money – that way he might find his talent will be rebooted.'
‘What do you do when your daily routine comes to a halt, when your latest achievement just might be your last?’
‘Everything we do in art is likely to turn out to be either prophecy or exorcism, whatever its other intentions.’
‘What had formerly been a sedative, a tranquilizing soporific, had morphed into a facilitator of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, even inspiration.’
In the latest Granta Podcast, John Barth – one of the pioneers of American literature...
An excerpt from Friedo Lampe’s At the Edge of Night, translated from the German by Simon Beattie.
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