Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse is a cycle of fourteen linked pieces that Barth designed to be read as a unit, each one circling the question of how stories get told. It opens with "Frame-Tale," a single sentence printed to be cut out and twisted into a Mobius strip that loops endlessly. The title story sends a self-conscious boy named Ambrose into a seaside funhouse while the narration breaks off to analyze its own technique. Elsewhere a story is narrated by a swimming sperm cell, by figures from Greek myth who know they are characters, and by the disembodied voice of narration. Together the pieces form a playful, self-questioning argument about fiction in an age that thought its forms were used up.