From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Tidewater Tales
The Tidewater Tales
The Tidewater Tales is a 1987 novel by the American
writer John Barth. Its narrative is told from the shared
perspectives of Peter Sagamore and Katherine Sherritt
Sagamore, a well-coupled couple in their 8 and a half
month of pregnancy in the summer of 1980. Peter Sag-
amore is a gifted author, whose gifts, we learn early on,
have been dwindling in recent years due to a malignant
relationship with "the demon Less is More". His fiction
has fizzled from sprawling works to solitary words on a
page, and his career has followed suit. His wife, Kather-
ine, herself a storyteller by trade, sets him a task at his
beckon: She asks him to take them sailing, and to tell her
the tale of a couple much like them in manner and make
and in their reckless decision to go sailing at such a deli-
cate time in her pregnancy. The result is "The Tidewater
Tales: a novel", or, the story of the stories these two sto-
rytellers swap whilst sailing in their ship, Story, atop the
waters of the Chesapeake Bay.[1]
References
[1] "BETWEEN BLAM AND BLOOEY". New York Times.
1987-06-28. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/
fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DB173BF93BA15755C0A961948260&n=To
Features/Books/Book%20Reviews. Retrieved
2008-10-22.
1st edition (publ. Putnam)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tidewater_Tales&oldid=470371219"
Categories:
• 1980 in fiction
• 1987 novels
• 20th-century American novels
• Novels about writers
• Novels by John Barth
• 1980s novel stubs
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