Harry Mathews

Mathews first and latest novel combined here in,one volume. Conversions concerns a party, a,quest, word-games, stories, digressionsnarrators, and storytellers. The JournalistMathews most recent novel includes a variety of,characters - "" A blend of postmodern metafiction,and old-style bedroom farce. Originally published,by David Godine in 1995.

The Conversions

Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathews's fictions.

Singular Pleasures

A novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their,complicated relationships from the 30s to the 60sfrom New York City to Upper New York State. As we,have come to expect from Mathews, nothing is as,simple as it might appear to be but we could,describe this as a story about Allen, who is,married to Maud, having an affair with Elizabethwho lives with Maud. What one can emphatically say,is that CIGARETTES is a brilliant display of,Mathews ingenuity and deadly playfulness.

Cigarettes

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

Tlooth

"It's outrageous that an educated man and a gifted writer like Mr. Mathews could make such a public confession of such shameful activities." Q. Kuhlmann, author of The Eye of Anguish: Subversive Activity in the German Democratic Republic

A Chronicle of 1973

My Life in CIA

As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the narrator's entries become more and more detailed and increasingly bizarre, especially as he begins to devise elaborate classification systems for his unwieldy materials. Since these entries require more and more of his time, he begins to withdraw from family and friends, entering a world perfectly ordered, organized, and utterly weird.

The Journalist

Fiction. Available again, along with Tlooth, as part of Dalkey Archive's American Literature Series, "Cigarettes" has been called "A brilliant and unsettling book... "(Tom Clark, Los Angeles Times Book Review). It is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. "Cigarettes" has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination" (Gilbert Sorrentino). Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A Novel

20 Lines a Day (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

Jacques Jouet

Italo Calvino

Paul Fournel

Claude Berge

Texts from the Bibliotheque Oulipienne (Anti-Classics of Dada.)

Oulipo Laboratory

The new tourism

The story of two young men who come to a picturesque beach town. Seen prismatically through the viewpoints of the town's residents, they offer a variety of worldviews. Yet are they really twins or a single person?

a novel

The solitary twin

The Human Country collects all of Mathews's shorter fiction, including the early stories from Country Cooking, the mid-career stories from The American Experience, and ten recent, previously uncollected pieces that are every bit as brilliant and surprising. These stories include "The Broadcast," in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock; "Clocking the World on Cue," an Oulipian story that employs the centuries-old literary form of the Chronogram; and "Calibration of Latitude," which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless journey (through the city and through his imagination) that in the end proves not aimless at all, but rather - like all of Mathews's work - purposeful and deeply moving.

New and Collected Stories

The Human Country

Marie Chaix

Marie Chaix loves her father Albert, who was one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party in 1936 and became a collaborator with the Germans, but must come to terms with his catastrophic political career.

The Laurels of Lake Constance

James Schuyler

Kenneth Koch

John Ashbery

III-IV.

Locus Solus

The Planisphere

Selected Longer Prose

The Way Home

A Remembrance of Georges Perec

The Orchard

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel--and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.

The Collected Essays

Immeasurable Distances

Poetry. Art. Preface by Arlo Haskell. Introduction by Daniel Levin Becker. Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was among the most inventive and unorthodox writers of his generation. His novels earned comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon and bear the mark of one who learned "never to settle for results that are merely reassuring." But Mathews was a poet first, and he prized poetry for its transformational and redemptive power. COLLECTED POEMS: 1946-2016 gathers seven prior collections, together with poems never before published in book form. Poems dedicated to John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch show Mathews's origins and commonalities with the poets of the New York School. Others reveal his obsession with the puzzles that animate the Oulipo, the famous French group of writers and mathematicians, in which Mathews was long the sole Ameri-can member. But Mathews's work transcends these affiliations. His maverick avant-gardism is all his own, nourished by wellsprings of romanticism and metaphysical fervor, in dialogue with literature, music, and art from the medieval to the modern period. For Mathews, it was "much more interesting to be curious about a riddle than to find its solution." His ability to fuse the world of facts with invented wildernesses of his imagining will give readers much to untangle, while his sensuality, wit, and affection for life's beauties, sorrows, and absurdities are their own rewards. COLLECTED POEMS: 1946-2016 augments and clarifies the extraordinary achievement of a singular American writer.

David Leavitt

About

Books

Join the club