Further Fridays

On Fridays, John Barth abandons life in the city and heads for his Chesapeake Bay retreat, where he duly exchanges his weekday fiction muse for a nonfiction one. Fridays have become a liberating time, Barth says, to "discover what I thought about some subject or other, before reconfronting the vacated ways and laying the keel for the next substantial fiction project." What emerges from these thoughtful adventures are witty essays, literary and otherwise, the tracks of an original and incisive mind. Ten years ago Barth published his first nonfiction collection, The Friday Book, to critical acclaim. Now, in Further Fridays, his life's "cardinal pursuits" - writing, reading, thinking, and teaching - give rise to a luminous range of creative musings. Barth shifts easily between the humorous and the erudite; his imagination draws his from postmodern fiction and chaos theory to memory, the arabesque, and the nature of imagination itself. Many of these ruminations, including his celebrated "It's a Long Story: Maximalism Reconsidered," have previously appeared in various periodicals. Others - whether in the form of essays, lectures, or addresses - are small masterpieces, never before published. Each is a journey, but never quite the one you expected.