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.
Famous quotes containing the word tales:
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)