Letters

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.