Summary
Coming Soon!!! (Houghton Mifflin)
A full-scale celebration of the career of John Barth, one of America's greatest comic writers. His experiments with form, his crazy circumlocutions and contractions of language and, in particular, his creation of double-gendered narration are explored, explained, exhibited and exclaimed over.(Part I of a two-part interview)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:07.0 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:13.0 | You are a very special breed, |
| 0:17.0 | for you are the only animal, |
| 0:20.0 | who can think, who can reason, who can read |
| 0:23.7 | Hello and welcome to Bookworm. |
| 0:27.1 | I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today |
| 0:29.0 | I have the honor to have as my guest |
| 0:32.1 | What I am almost afraid to say |
| 0:36.8 | Is my favorite living American writer. |
| 0:40.0 | His works have had such an enormous effect on my life. |
| 0:45.6 | I've read them lifelong from the age of 16 to the present. |
| 0:50.0 | His newest book, Coming Soon, A Narrative, comes out from Houghton Mifflin soon. |
| 0:59.1 | But his work begins with the floating opera, continues with the end of the row, the sotweed factor, the gal's goat boy, lost in the fun house, letters, sabbatical, |
| 1:14.2 | I left out chimera, tidewater tales. On with the story. I love these books because you can read them again and again. They infiltrate one another. They contain one another. The award-winning book of novellas, chimera, belongs essentially encased at the center of letters. They mirror each other, contradict one |
| 1:48.1 | another, twin each other, surround each other. It is not just stories, but stories about |
| 1:54.7 | stories within stories, and a profound understanding that a scrutiny of what a story is may reveal some of the riddles of life's own transitions, |
| 2:07.7 | so that Kabbalah-like, you look at his texts for their revelations, ultimately, about life. |
| 2:15.4 | I wanted to ask you, first of all, Jack Barth, |
| 2:19.7 | if you would situate coming soon, the new novel, |
| 2:24.0 | because it seems to be the last and first book of your career. |
| 2:28.7 | I've thought of sometimes as my latest last book, |
... |
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