Chimera

Summary

The book consists of three linked novellas that retell the stories of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon, with the ancient figures forced to reckon with middle age, exhaustion, and the difficulty of telling their tales at all. Barth uses self-aware framing, time travel, and authorial intrusion to turn myth into a meditation on storytelling itself. It became a signature work of American postmodern fiction.