A landmark collection of metafictional stories that covers myths, family histories, courtship rituals, artistic failure and existential farce.

All the while, in Barths fashion, the stories repeatedly expose the devices holding them together: narrators interrupt themselves, forms double back, language becomes both the maze and the thread through it. “Night-Sea Journey” turns a sperm’s progress toward conception into a theological monologue; “Ambrose His Mark” makes family legend out of accident, embarrassment and retrospective invention; the title story places adolescence inside a funhouse whose mirrors multiply desire, humiliation and self-consciousness. 

First published in 1968, Lost in the Funhouse belongs to the period when American postwar fiction became suspicious of realism’s claims to naturalness. It is demanding, comic, occasionally exhausting and enormously influential—a book for readers interested in Nabokov, Borges, Donald Barthelme and fiction that treats form as part of the drama.

Anchor Books edition, 1988. Paperback with rubbing, edge wear, spine creasing and general shelf wear; internally clean and sound.