John Barth, Bearded Bards & Splitting Hairs

John Barth, Bearded Bards & Splitting HairsJohn Barth, Bearded Bards & Splitting Hairs is the seventeenth issue of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, a Festschrift edited by Eckhard Gerdes and built around the work of John Barth. It is not a Barth book; it is a book about Barth, assembled the way JEF has built its single author tributes since Raymond Federman proposed an entire issue devoted to his own work. Its centerpiece is a previously unpublished essay by Barth, presented as a lecture

Beasley displays genuine affection for the historical Ravel

not as a settled genre to be sampled

The deluxe hardcover

The play section gathers the full cast onto one stage

The son of a suicidal Prussian Junker family becomes obsessed with an albino boy

and Eckhard Gerdes built the result into the template every later JEF Festschrift would follow

blurbing it

--Curtis White

and the festival deputy's quiet coup against his boss

gathering thirty-five writers under one cover

and Gerdes himself

closer to that tradition than to anything else on the JEF list