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Lost in the Funhouse cover

Lost in the Funhouse

John Barth

0

awards won

4

score

#2906 of 8,085 books · #1360 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction (1969).

Lost in the Funhouse was a National Book Award Finalist. John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-within-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad," and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidoscope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.

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Publisher
Anchor
ISBN-13
9780804152501
Genre
Fiction
Topics
Meaning of existenceMetafiction and narrative experimentationIdentity and self-discovery

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