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In a novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth, the dean of postmodern fiction, spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the experimental writers who have followed on the path of his literary trailblazing.
Charming, playful, and teeming with Barth’s vintage wit, Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. Inspired by a gently sinking showboat replica called The Original Floating Opera II, grounded on a shoal somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay as a hurricane (and Y2K) approaches, they race each other to write a novel about a floating opera — a reprise of the fictional mentor’s first novel, of Barth’s own first novel, of Edna Ferber’s literary monument Show Boat and its spawn of musicals and films. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers explore, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.
At a moment of intense renewed interest in postmodernism, Coming Soon!!! is sure to be one of the publishing events of the season. It is an extraordinary addition to — and in many respects a commentary on — Barth’s distinguished career as the author of a series of books that has shaped contemporary literature.

"Although COMING SOON!!! didn't make it in time for Y2K, Barth has tried hard to capture the moment by imitating the devices of Internet fiction, offering point-and-click buttons and hotlinked words. But this feels like a fruitless gimmick, since otherwise the pagebound story proceeds in a pretty straightforward way....His hyperintellectual regard for his earlier books seems fetishistic, and what lax attention he directs to the real world is warped by this literary narcissism."

Brian Evenson, Bookforum, Fall 2001

"[U]nderneath all the capering, Barth's tackling all the big themes here, so many in fact that an overstuffed reader might wish he'd left a couple over for next time. In addition to, natch, itself, COMING SOON!!! is about every imaginable kind of death: of the author, of the novel, even of the last millennium....Whenever the whole enterprise threaten to capsize under its cuteness, Barth's good old-fashioned expressive powers usually bail him out. To read this lifelong sailor as he describes the simple pleasure of mooring a cutter amid the evensong of waves and waterfowl, is to remember that Picasso, before he invented Cubism, was one hell of a draftsman."

David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 11/25/2001

Coming Soon: A Narrative: Search Results