Title: Once upon a time
Subtitle: a floating opera
First published: 1994
Description: From master storyteller and National Book Award winner John Barth comes a bravura performance: a memoir wrapped in a novel and launched on a sea voyage.

A cutter-rigged sloop sets sail for an end-of-season cruise down into the "Chesapeake Triangle." Our captain: a middle-aged writer of some repute. The sole crewmate: his lover, friend, editor, and wife. The journey turns out to be not the modest three-day cruise it at first seems.

As we sail through sun and storm, our skipper spins (and is spun by) the Story of His Life - an operatic saga that's part Verdi, part Puccini, and more than a dollop of bouffe, a compound narrative voyaging through the imagination.

Crisscrossing the past, mixing memory with desire, our narrator navigates among the waypoints of his life, beguiling us with tales of adventure and despair, love and marriage, selves and counterselves, aging and sailing, teaching and writing - steering always by the polestar of Vocation, the storyteller's call.

With all the narrative verve, playful flourishes, and dazzling prose that made works like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Giles Goat-Boy, and The Sot-Weed Factor so memorable, Once Upon a Time is a mesmerizing and entertaining performance from one of the most important writers of our time.
Subjects: Fiction, Novelists, Autobiographical fiction, Belletristische Darstellung, Literaturproduktion, American Novelists, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Authors, fiction, Fiction, general
LC classification: PS3552.A75 O53 1994