"By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, [Barth] was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style. . . . Barth's influence is unmistakable in David Foster Wallace's work, as it is in that of so many others, including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders and David Mitchell. . . . For all of Barth's outrageous experiments, he always seemed to find his way back to the basic moral question that every great fiction writer has tried to wrangle: How should one be?" --The New York Times

"[A] playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction." --The Guardian