Letters

(You read this on [supply date and news items]. How time passes. Sic transit! Plus ça change! On the letterhead date itself, in fact, there was, beyond certain actions of our story, no particular news of note. Further U.S. troop withdrawals from Southeast Asia scheduled for the fall; South Vietnamese army desertion rate continues at 10,000 per month. Exxon oil tanker Manhattan completes first successful Northwest Passage to Alaska. U.S. Attorney General’s office receives without disapproval “more reasonable schedule” of court sentences for illegal drug use. Happy birthday Jan Masaryk, Ivan Pavlov, Alexander von Humboldt, Luigi Cherubini. On this date in history: 1901: President McKinley dies from assassin’s bullet in Buffalo, New York. 1862: General McClellan drives back General Lee in Battle of South Mountain, Maryland. 1814: Fort McHenry bombardment ceases; F. S. Key reports flag still there) the end.

About the Author

John Barth won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973 for Chimera, a volume of novellas. He is the author of four novels, Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor, The Floating Opera, and The End of the Road, as well as a series of short fictions for print, tape, and live voice, Lost in the Funhouse. Born in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1930, Mr. Barth was elected in 1974 to both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Barth is presently the Alumni Centennial Professor of English and Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Back Cover

LETTERS…

scarlet

fatal

forged

misdirected

amatory

doctored

concealed

crossed

purloined…

are triumphantly delivered in this new comic masterpiece, the first novel in a decade by the man the New York Times called “the best writer of fiction we have in America at present, and one of the best we have ever had.”

LETTERS revives an old-time form — the epistolary novel — and transforms it into a dazzling comic epic of today. The seven letter-writers—“drolls and dreamers” all — are:

• a fifty-year old British gentlewoman, erstwhile mistress (by her own confession) of Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley and James Joyce, who finds herself disconcertingly pregnant again;

• a seventy-year-old small-town bachelor lawyer who enjoys cordial incest during his final cruise on Chesapeake Bay;

• a long-time patient at a Canadian Remobilization Farm, who is ordered to re-dream history or die;

• a terrorist, or counter-terrorist, poet laureate who sets about to blow up the birthplace of our National Anthem, or to prevent others from so doing;

• a rival novelist, who may in fact be a very large insect with computer assistance, plotting from his base in the Spiritualist Capital of America;

• the avant-garde lover of the aforementioned gentlewoman;

• the Author himself, none other.

At once John Barth’s most novel novel, the culmination of all his fiction thus far, and a fabulous roller-coaster ride through the hazards and delights of our lives and histories, such is LETTERS.