John Barth's lively and highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"—printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Möbius strip—to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do.

Highlights include the Homerian story-within-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad," and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence.

Together, their stories form a kaleidoscope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.