Page from Ficciones with John Barth’s notes
Page from Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, with John Barth’s notes
Covers of Cosmicomics
Page from Stories and Texts for Nothing, with John Barth’s notes
Page from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, with John Barth's notes

In the mid 1960s, while teaching at the University of Buffalo, Barth studied writers like Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. He identified these writers as practitioners of metafiction, a literary method in which narrative form is not just “the form of the story but the fact of the story itself; the medium is (part of) the message.” He collected and annotated works from his postmodern idols and/or peers, including books by Beckett, Borges, Italo Calvino, and media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. In the spirit of these writers, Barth’s work itself turned increasingly self-aware, layered, and labyrinth-like.