"
Giles Goat-Boy is a bonkers Cold War allegory that draws from the Bible,
Oedipus Rex,
Don Quixote, and
Ulysses, among other works." –
The New York Times
"[Barth's novels are] distinguished by a wide range of erudition, invention, wit, historical references, whimsy, bawdiness, and a great richness of image and style." –
The Paris Review "By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, [Barth] was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style. . . . Barth's influence is unmistakable in David Foster Wallace's work, as it is in that of so many others, including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders and David Mitchell. . . . For all of Barth's outrageous experiments, he always seemed to find his way back to the basic moral question that every great fiction writer has tried to wrangle: How should one be?"
–The New York Times
"[A] playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction."
–The Guardian
