The Sot-Weed Factor

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting . . . to roam the world since Candide."

"A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy-is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the ...