Sabbatical: A Romance

by John Barth, John Barth (Foreword by)

Overview

Subtitled “a romance,” Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature—part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe—and her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers, a direct descendant of the author of “The Star Spangled Banner” and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead.

True to its subtitle, the novel combines the mysterious and marvelous (unexplained disappearances, a fabled sea monster in Chesapeake Bay) with romantic love and daring adventure.

Sabbatical is quintessential Barth: it involves sailing, twinship, the joy of love and literature, the sorrow of death and disaster, and a playfully complex narrative. The author has written a foreword for this new edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564780966
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	08/28/1996
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	5.46(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

JOHN BARTH's fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. For many years he taught in the writing seminars at John Hopkins University. He is the author of such seminal works as "The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera" (for which he won the NBA), and "Giles Goat-Boy".

Editorial Reviews

"Barth has proved again and again that he can equal the traditionalists at their own game, and thus he has won the right to be different." --Saturday Review

Dalkey Archive Press

"Barth, almost alone among his fellows, will have none of the bloodless abstractions. Among his many styles, what is most distinctive is his toughness, the quick march of his verbs, his reliance on muscular Anglo-Saxon locutions, his puns." --Washington Post

Dalkey Archive Press

"The best writer of fiction in America." --New York Times

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

"Movingly original," said LJ's reviewer of this tale of teacher Susan and her ex-CIA operative-turned-expos-writer husband Fenwick Turner, who try to make life decisions while on a sabbatical voyage on the Chesapeake Bay (LJ 5/15/82).

Library Journal