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
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
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...
‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’
Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.
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