After the publication of The Tobacco Planter and Giles, the goat boy, Sixth Floor rescues in a single volume the first two novels of John Barth, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, which have many points in common: both can be considered novels philosophical in which an existentialist fatalism and a nihilism prevail in part debtors of Sartre, Camus and the postwar Zeitgeist, although they are not exempt (to the delight of the readers) of an evident load of humor and irony, mark of the house; in both there is a more than peculiar love triangle and both are written in a style that, although striking and original, full of intelligence and virtuosity, is rather realistic as opposed to the overflowing and playful incursions into the metafiction that we would see in later works of Barth and that would become the hallmark of the author.

 Thus, this rescue is doubly necessary: ​​it puts two exhausted titles back into circulation in our bookstores, while at the same time claiming them as tremendously enjoyable works, with their own literary value and quality, which deserve to occupy a prominent place in the Barthian constellation. In The Floating Opera, finalist of the National Book Award in 1956, we see the nonsense of life through the eyes of Todd Andrews, a thirties lawyer who decides to commit suicide. The end of the road introduces us to a character, the young Jack Horner, who also follows that path full of dark thoughts, but who ends up putting himself in the hands of a doctor, a brilliant mixture of saint and devil, with whom he will begin the strangest of the "priests."