Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Vol. 3

Laurence Sterne's continuation of the most digressive novel ever written finds our narrator still desperately attempting to tell his own life story, yet somehow managing to dedicate seventy pages to a single day while somehow also skipping over years at a time. Volume 3 continues the legendary courtship between the innocent and sex-obsessed Uncle Toby and the cunning Widow Wadman, whose pursuit of the virtuous bachelor becomes a hilarious battle of wills. Meanwhile, Tristram himself remains trapped in a perpetual state of beginning, never quite arriving at the present moment because he's too busy telling you about the circumstances of his conception, his father's theories on naming, or the precise shape of Widow Wadman's left eye. Sterne's masterpiece demolished every narrative convention of its era and invented most of modern literature in the process: stream of consciousness, metafiction, unreliable narration, and the novel that knows it's a novel all bloom here in filthy, brilliant profusion. This is a book that treats storytelling itself as the ultimate joke, and the joke has never stopped being funny.