Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay—“​​jeux d’esprits,” as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth’s literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.  “Barth’s earlier accomplishments amount to a watershed for the country’s fiction, a landmark in what’s known as Postmodernism. … As Barth’s work matures, its elements of experiment take us further from the ordinary.” —John Domini, LitHub “Every sentence he writes either looks at itself askance or ushers in a following sentence that will perform the task. In his fascinated commitment to the art—and to the criticism—of storytelling, he has no rival.”—William Pritchard,  New York Times “John Barth has spent most of his allotted era watching our wheels spin with a coolly detached, not unamused gaze.  He doesn’t ignore or eschew change, but he takes a wider view. He is Heraclitean to the core. . . . If, as Nabokov wrote in the Afterword to Lolita, art is kindness, then John Barth embodies art every bit as much as anyone ever has.”—James Greer,  LA Review of Books John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly. “Out of the Cradle” (1,178 words)   “I stand here ironing,” declares the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s much-anthologized short story of that title. Me, I sit here rocking—in my two-dozen-year-old swivel desk chair at my forty-plus-year-old work table, between strokes of my Parker (19)51 fountain pen in the seventy-year-old loose-leaf binder (picked up during my freshman orientation at Johns Hopkins in 1947) in which I’ve first-drafted every apprentice and then professional sentence of my writing life, up to and including this extended one—my now nearly nine-decades-old body taking idle comfort in the so-familiar oscillation that has, this workday morning, caught the attention of its octogenarian mind. Nothing vigorous, this rocking: just a gentle, intermittent back-and-forthing as I scan my notes and exfoliate them into these sentences and paragraphs. Notes, e.g., on the ubiquitous popularity of rocking chairs (including the iconic John F. Kennedy Rocker), porch swings, hammocks, and the like: a popularity surely owing to our body’s memory of having been calmed and soothed through babyhood in parental arms, cradles, infant-slings, maybe, later on, rocking-horses. And in adulthood, a particularly delicious feeling for my wife and myself was the gentle rocking of our cruising sailboat at anchor in one of the many snug coves of Chesapeake Bay. These calmative effects in turn no doubt derive from our prenatal rocking in the womb as our mothers went about their pregnant daily business, themselves rocking in chairs now and then to rest between stand-up chores and to lull their increasingly active cargo. We are not surprised to hear from neuroscientists and physicians that rocking releases endorphins, which abet our physical and mental health—though one also remembers the furious, feverish rocking of the never-to-be-soothed protagonist in D. H. Lawrence’s ironically titled “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Old-timers, especially, favor rockers as they circle toward second childhood, and nursing homes, particularly ones for patients with dementia, are more and more using rocking chairs as therapy: Thus from “Rock-a-Bye Baby” we rock and roll our way to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Rockin’ Chair’s Got Me.” “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking,” writes Walt Whitman of the waves of Long Island Sound, “I . . . a reminiscence sing.” A boyhood beach-memory, it is, of his having sharply pitied the keenings of a male mockingbird bereft of its mate: desolated love-cries that the Good Gray Poet is pleased in retrospect to imagine having inspired his whole ensuing poetical life’s work. And that he now “fuses” with the sea’s “low and delicious word”—“Death, death, death, death, death”—to arrive at an intellectual acceptance and emotional transcendence of The End. Not for us to question whether, in Whitman’s case, the poem’s conclusion declares a psychological accomplishment on its author’s part or merely raises a hopeful/wishful possibility. In my own case, as befits a mere novelist, the out-of-the cradle rocking-r