What novel was written by an American writer best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction?
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 Sagamore 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, Katherine, 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 delicate time in her pregnancy. The result is "The Tidewater Tales: a novel", or, the story of the stories these two storytellers swap whilst sailing in their ship, Story, atop the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
Permutation City Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. Sections of the story were adapted from Egan's 1992 short story "Dust" which dealt with many of the same philosophical themes. "Permutation City" won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award that same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 "Scientific American" article on multiverses by Max Tegmark.