Product Description
At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast of an uncharted French island.

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Pynchonian Predecessor
"The Crying of Lot 49" is a perfect little book, with obvious influences from Borges.It was obviously heavily influenced by this book as well.The similarities of the labyrinthian search for answers that only uncovers more and more puzzling questions, leaving the searcher questioning whether or not any of his original premises were even valid, is done to perfection by Mathews.Both he and Pynchon's version combine with perfection inventive word play and elaborate plots.Nothing against Pynchon, because he has delivered on everything he produced (yes, even "Vineland" and "Against the Day"), but Mathews wins this contest of similarities.If only Mathews could have delivered as much with the rest of his oeuvre.Highly recommended.

Curiouser and curiouser
This is a book that was meticulously planned - word play and images, false starts and unreliable history - all in an interplay that is both riveting and frustrating.Riveting because of the quality of the imagination; frustrating because reading is one long riddle requiring very intense concentration by the reader.

The book is filled with wordplay ... most notably beginning with a gypsy "game" of describing the scene on a ball filled with boiling water ...; the narrator wins the game in what is called "a new triumph ... of analytical poetry over descriptive prose".Songs seem to carry hidden messages.Horse pedigrees are given in exhaustive detail.A man writes and speaks backwards - two languages, in effect, for one reverses sounds, the other letter.Old manuscripts hide clues in the red letters at the beginning of each line - if you only know what to add and where to divide.Authors and titles of books seized at customs, nine civil servants each of whom distorts language more strongly than the predecessor.

Through all the word play is a plot that is entertaining - but not always sufficiently so to motivate one to put the work into reading that this novel demands.

In short, The Conversions has a fascinating use of language in a satisfactory plot; the author is in full control at all times.Well worth your time ... but chose your time well.

a perfect book
Harry Mathews is the most important novelist writing in the English language that no one reads.It's a pity, for he writes with a style and engagement that, if left in less talented hands, could be consideredeffete, but with his mastery of language and narrative comes off as puregenius.

The Conversions is essentially about solving a riddle, but thesearch for its answer allows Mathews to do what he's best at: tellingstories, and in all respects displaying a love for and engaging with thepotential of language.

If you've not read Mathews before, this book willget you hooked; you'll soon want to read his novels, his essays, poems andother pieces, and will soon recognize that he is an American master, onewhose works will only grow in stature with the years. ... Read more

Product Description
Fiction. This classic text by Oulipo writer Harry Mathewsbegins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game and goes on adigressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then to India andMorocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews' fictionalconcern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories withinstories within stories. "Harry Mathews' TLOOTH fits no category I canthink of ... in his inventiveness and erudition he is like Pynchon,Barth, and William Gaddis"--Granville Hicks, Saturday Review. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Take that, Oprah!
The imagination runs wild in this book -- rather like a chariot with a wheel slipping from its axis. A maddening read --I couldn't finish this book in one sitting , as someone commented above. One chapter a night wasall I could handle, and with the plot and locales veering all over the map,I had a hard time remembering what I had read the night before. And yet, Iknew that I absolutely HAD to finish Tlooth, and when I did, I was glad;the end reveals what this book is about (and it is about something afterall). Erudite, staggeringly digressive, subversive, dreamlike,pansexual: TLOOTH gives mainstream fiction a rousing slap on the behind.(Expand that metaphor into something more knuckle-y, and you'll get thegist of what I really mean.) It's not a book in the usual sense of theworld. It's a disorientation. Either you are up to it, or you aren't. NOTan Oprah Book Club selection (thank God)!

Playful and brilliant
Wow!This is the first book in a long while that Isat down and read straight through in one sitting, and then read it again the next day.This book is layered and layered again, twisting through puzzles, puns andwordgames that revolve back into itself.It's wildly imaginative in itsstyle and content, and the over the top humor would suit fans of Pynchonand Barthelme, but his control of the language and playfulness is even moreextreme once you allow yourself to dig in.This is not a quick read forthe subway, but a novel that will challenge your expectations and ideas onwhat a piece of fiction should and should not be.

Brilliant prose, or pretensious crap?
Damned if I know, but I'll lean towards the latter. Fascinating stuff; this novel is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, pieces from other puzzles thrown in, or maybe just a few too many pieces to make a cohesivewhole. Is it genius? It certainly is one of the most unique books I've everread, and one of the most difficult; the innumerous games spotted about thetext almost makes me feel as if the author is challenging us. "Go on,you stupid idjit," he says, "Come along and figure me. If youcan." It shure as hell beat me...but even if I can't figure it out,there are enough moments of Heller-esque lunacy to make this bookworthwhile...such as the savage tribe whose numbers are dwindling becausethey believe the sun will not rise without a human sacrifice...or themysterious bog which utters...er, well...or the ingenious baseball gameplayed with a rigged ball set against the somber backdrop of a siberianprison camp. Lovely stuff...so, it comes highly recommended, but try not toget too frustrated when the book just seems to be written expressely forthat purpose. One more game: how do you visualise the narrator? Are you sosure that's who the narrator is? Do you really know this character? (Note:those who finish the book fair and square should know what I'm talkingabout...Sure caught me by surprise. Hee...)

Glad it's back in print!
This, Harry Mathews' second novel, has been out of print for far too long.Translated by Georges Perec as Les verts champs de moutarde del'Afghanistan, Tlooth is, like Gray's Lanark, a novel of incredbile andimpossible occurences told in a deadpan manner. Set in a Russian prisoncamp, this novel begins at a baseball game featuring the Defective Baptistsversus the Fideists... and it gets progressively stranger and moreinteresting from there. ... Read more

Product Description
The first paperback edition of Singular Pleasures, sixty-one vignettes on the sole subject of masturbation, records the imaginative varieties of this activity in prose that is playful, intimate, quirky and humane. The soloists range in age from nine to eighty; the locales from Australia to Zaire; the means of masturbation from the commonplace to the bizarre. The young man in Gaza with his hair dryers, the woman in Manilla with her cello bow, the long-eared bat, the charioteer, the candelabra--this swirl of unlikely individuals and objects is brought together in such a way that it floods a world born fresh once more. Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathewss fictions. The illustrator has also collaborated with such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and John Wieners. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A series of fetes for the one thing besides death...
...that unites us all. The sheer breadth of fantasy, mechanical aids and passive witness employed in these 61 tableux is staggering: hysterical, sad, inventive, invective, or finally just so blatantly quotidian you suddenly findyourself acknowledging your habituated pleasures in a similar light.

Ifyou don't feel the need for the illustrations (I personally prefer itwithout), the complete text of "Singular Pleasures" is includedin the Mathews prose anthology "The Way Home" published by theever-trustworthy Atlas Press.

Brilliant realization of high concept
The concept, as I read it, is that most of us are bound by a common secret--masturbation--and that the lengths we go to in order to achieve release are what makes us distinct from each other as individuals--ourimaginations. To prove it, Mathews, one of America's best unkowns, haswritten 61 vignettes of people of all ages and nationalities doing whateverit takes to express themselves. For example: "A man of thirty-five isabout to experience orgasm in one of the better condominiums in Gaza. He ismasturbating, but neither hand nor object touches his taut penis: arrangedin a circle, five hairblowers direct their streams of warm air toward thatfocal point. He has plugged his ears with wax balls." Not all thevignettes are as funny; some are sad, some are touching, some make you tiltyour head to one side, hoping for understanding; hoping in vain. ... Read more

Product Description
Fiction. Available again, along with TLOOTH, as part ofDalkey Archive's American Literature Series, CIGARETTES has beencalled "A brilliant and unsettling book ..." -- Tom Clark, Los AngelesTimes Book Review. It is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracingtheir complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from NewYork City to Upper New York State."CIGARETTES has the delicate yetrigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the lightstreaming through its apertures we are still attentive to itscarpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, aconstant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination" -- GilbertSorrentino. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Life is short
Cigarettes appears to be Harry Mathews' most conventional novel. That is only because Mathews' experimental devices and his far off, imaginary locations are not a part of this work. Surely this work is nothing like the previous work, but it is as artistic as the others. This is the literature of the salon, of Marcel Proust and, shall I dare say it, Jane Austen? And if one does not read the name on the cover, it does seem to be the work of a woman writer, say Djuna Barnes or Jane Bowles, and of course Two Serious Ladies is mentioned and read in Mathews' book. Two Serious Ladies may be used as a way into this complex, labyrinthine work.

Even though this novel may have some realistic qualities, (usually when we're dealing with Mathews, Realism is never a consideration, and language is of a main concern), it is a labyrinth of relationships of a group of people living in artistic New York in the 1950s and the 1960s. As opposed to Mathews' first novels, The Conversions and Tlooth where the imagination rules, the characters of Cigarettes do seem real, like a 19th century novel perhaps.

But I am willing to say that it must be that none of these characters are based on real people as much as they have been entirely invented "out of the whole cloth" by Mathews.

He has said good-bye to the days of adzes, stories in the arctic, Gypsies, bi-sexual baseball players, invented languages, Adrien Le Roi, Auerbach, and literary paper chases. Now Mathews is concentrating on more conventional means of writing, more realistic. It is not at all a defeatist work. One cannot write for that audience of 500 forever.

Each of the 14 chapters pair off two of the 13 main characters, and chapter by chapter we see the shape of relationships and the ever-changing extent of seriousness. Allen is married to Maud, and he has a relationship with Elizabeth. Priscilla, Walter Trale's lover, is Allen and Maud's daughter. Owen is blackmailing Allen for Elizabeth's portrait; he once found his daughter Phoebe, posing nude for the painter, Walter. Owen is married to Louisa, and he has another son, Lewis, who is a writer and the sado-masochistic lover of Morris. Morris is an art critic, and has a sister Irene, who is an art dealer. Irene owns a forgery of Elizabeth's portrait done by Phoebe, who also become an art dealer. The real portrait and the fake are exchanged at one moment, and only a few people are aware of this.

All through the novel parents misunderstand their children, and the other way around, children always misunderstand everyone, and lovers never have a clue. The novel ends with a moving meditation on death, and the fact that "we become the dead." Definitely, the ideal reader becomes more involved with this novel than with others; the reader who is passive may have too much trouble keeping up with the different people who make up this story. Mathews here has developed a few new structural devices. There are many questions. Who is the narrator? Is there a chapter missing? Is this story based around a secret palindrome?

This novel pretends to portray psychological depth, and tricks the reader into thinking so, but after it's all over it laughs at the possibility of depth. And the reader also laughs, or cries, for this novel suggest that personality or the other is always misunderstood. Everyone has friends or lovers that are like a puff of smoke and then gone, like a "cigarette." This is not a conclusion to the book, but just an aspect, a nuance, the real conclusion is that relationships and fiction remain inconclusive.

one of the great novels of the 20th century
a classic. a comedy of manners that gradually interconnects a milieu of upper middle class americans -- the most seemingly straightforward and accessible of mathews' novels. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

"...on a bed of black swan feathers Mallarme's left ulna reposed....."
I found this novel to be unreadable.We alternate between letters written by a man in Miami mixed up in treasure-hunting schemes and his "wife," whose early missives are written in some kind of pidgin English that is too difficult to interpret.As we move along, her writing eventually loses its primitive qualities, but it's not worth the struggle to get through the first two-thirds of the book.

Yes, as long as Zachary is doing the narrating, it's interesting.Yes, there is bizarre poetic writing.Yes, there are arcane vocabulary words that will send you to the dictionary.Yes, there is splashy local color about the Carnival celebrations in Miami.Yes, there are amusing details about some secret cult and its rites and initiations. And lots of intrigue about old maps and missing Medici gold. But it's just not worth it. You have to force your way through Twang's subliterate phrasings, and I found it so easy to just skip her letters entirely.And, yes, there is some kind of triple or quadruple twist in the final pages, but I just didn't get a sense that the payoff was worth it.

Inventive Fiction at its Best
In a sense, society can be considered the connections between individuals, instead of the individuals themselves. This book explores one such connection, in the form of a series of letters between a married couple. Their connection is exposed as a frail and tenuous thing, buffeted by confusion, frustration, and yearning.Make no mistake though, this is not simply a novel about a relationship. This is avant garde literature of the highest rank. Mathews' wordplay is exceptional and he spins tales, in turn tragic and comic, in and out of the main narrative. The plot is less an arc than a contrail, tightly focused at one end and disturbingly hazy at the other. This is an exceptional novel for lovers of language who like their fiction unconventional. Also, I give Mathews high marks for one of the most imaginative uses of a title for a novel I've ever encountered.

fun, intelligent... and a great read
Probably the only work ever to use the title as a major plot point/punchline (and a damned effective one, at that), Mathews' novel turns the epistolary genre on its head, with a bizarre love story cum treasure hunt, all wrapped into a tight package of slapstick comedy, mystery, history, culture, and linguistic peculiarities.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mathews' work, he's a member of the Oulipo, a group (or groups) of writers, mathematicians, poets, painters, etc., etc. - who both rescue stylistic constraints from the past and create new ones of their own. So you can always expect that their works will be impeccable structured, rich in detail, language play, and erudition. On top of that, at least one of the characters (Twang) is beautifully written, with a wealth of puns and a generous heap of charm.

There are two minor concerns with the novel that forced me to downgrade it to 4 stars, instead of a perfect five.The first is that the big plot twist, while necessary to set up the game of gross misjudgments in the second half of the novel, comes across as a bit contrived.The second is that the style, while often flexible, fascinating, and outright hilarious, is sometimes uneven - there's none of the assuredness in his writing that you'd find in Cigarettes, for example.

Still, a great read, and highly highly recommended.I wish Mathews and the Oulipo gang were more widely read.

Erudite and unusual
This novel is about a man and woman hunting for sunken treasure of gold.The style is a bit abstruse and intellectual, and is not intented for mass audiences.Yet if you pay attention and are persistent, you will find lots of witty lines and some rather poetic phrasings.It is a very unusual book ... the best comparisons I can think of are Fowles' "The Magus" or Umberto Eco's stuff.And maybe John Barth.Stick with it, the ending will surprise you. ... Read more

Product Description
The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever.

The Oulipo’s original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers).

The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Reformatting The Muse
Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

Absolutely Hilarious
This book is a riot!I highly recommend it.All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, agroup of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience. ... Read more

Product Description
Available For The First Time In One Volume, The Very Best Of Mathews's Short Fiction; This expertly designed original paperback presents a comprehensive collection of internationally renowned poet and novelist Harry Mathews' short prose. From the hilarious 'The Broadcast,' in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock, to 'Calibration of Latitude,' which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless but deeply moving journey, this is a long-awaited addition to Mathew's beloved and masterful canon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unheralded (mostly) genius.
Matthews is an anachronism: he finds the beautiful by means of astounding discipline. He re-imagines what language can do by stripping it down into its mechanistic (almost) elements. And when he gets there, he finds something startling and amazing. Screw post-modern. This is pre-modern and all the more stunning and original for it. He will change the way you see and think, and I'm not exaggerating on that.

By the way, this is no Joycean academic wankery. These stories are readable and enjoyable. That they tear your head off, turn it upside down, and squish up all the goo inside is almost incidental to the sheer surface pleasure. ... Read more

Product Description
diaristic "20 lines a day, genius or not" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting insights into a writer's life and thoughts
Harry Mathews gave himself a writing assignment: before going to work on the last chapters of the novel he was writing at the time (Cigarettes), he would write at least 20 lines of something, anything.He mostly tried to avoid automatic writing and forced himself to stick to whatever subject he started out with, but he made no demands on himself of quality or insightfulness.The exercises produced surprising results, work of much better quality than he expected, and they are collected here in chronological order.

This is not the sort of book you will finish reading and say, "That was one of the great reading experiences of my life."The pleasures here are not earth-shaking or mind-blowing.But there are pleasures here, quite a few.The book reads like a journal, because many times Mathews wrote about what was going on in his life (a few people who were close to him had died just before he began the exercises), and the entries which stick to his everyday life can become dull and repetitive for a reader -- its when Mathews lets his imagination wander, or puts down some of his ideas about writing, that these pages really come alive.

The book is highly readable, whether you know Mathews's other work or not, because the exercises are short and the language clear.It's easy enough to skip around in the book, reading it on different days, looking for entries which appeal to whatever mood you happen to be in at the moment.Reading them in order produces a certain feeling of intimacy with the author, though, and the book is oddly moving by the end. ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Ambitious
One of Harry Mathew' most ambitious and strikingly original novels. His fifth novel, The Journalist, confronts our present day disillusionment with reality and the art of writing. I recommend this novel for its summoning back of all those delicious qualities that I havd found both attractive and mind-expanding when first encountering Mathews' work. The concept is simple: the narrator keeps a journal to help him organize his life. But nothing is ever so simple. His ordinary life as a European businessman receives amazing scrutiny as he becomes meticulous in recording his life's events, shrews details, and his daily thoughts. The characters of his journal include his wife Daisy, his mistress Colette, his son Gert, and his friend Paul. Those designations don't in his life don't last long as the journalist worries about relations between his wife and Paul and his mistress and Gert.

The journalist soon decides that his journal needs subcatergories: certain sections for the objective facts and other parts for his subjective thoughts. As he organizes the journal into more severe categories, the secret meetings around him proliferate. As an Oulipian, Mathews has emploed a poetical structive to create a world unto itself and has refined and updated his language with this novel which, in the context of contemporary Modernism, rivals both Nabokov's Pale Fire and Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Comfort for the obsessive-compulsive
Have you ever worried about that thought that keeps running through your head, again and again? A line from a song that won't let go of you? A need to get into the details of the details of the details? If so, get yourself a copy of The Journalist. Read it. You'll immediately feel the tension draining away: You may be bad, but nowhere near THAT bad. What a relief!

Of course, it won't hurt if you're also a Harry Mathews fan like I am. And an Oulipo fan. And if you're not acquainted with either, this is as good a place as any to get started with both of them. Enjoy!

Clever, thoughtful and most importantly, hilarious
For several days upon completing this book, I found myself laughinguncontrollably at the memory of certain passages.Does this book poke funat Mathew's strategies as an Oulipian?We don't know.We just have tolaugh and pity the character's obsession with order and structure.Irecommend this book to anyone who is interested in observing how we write,think and react to a crisis.

Truly Unique
The plot of the story, interesting as it is, becomes secondary to how this book is written.Addictive and hard to put down! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One of the great poets of experimental form
This book is best described by "Trial Impressions," a 30-part poem which dominates the middle of the book.The first part of the poem reprints, verbatim, a short piece by the English poet John Dowland.The rest of the poems in the sequence rewrite this poem, each in a different way: as sestina, as Mallarmean sonnet, as contemporary plea ("Up to Date"), as an Oulipo "N+7" exercise (using two different dictionaries), as a detective riddle, as a palindrome, as Chinese imagism ("The Wang Way."), etc.The closest precedent to this amazing poem is Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style," another Oulipean tour de force.The poem is funny, touching, and maddening.There are other great works in the book, including the title piece (a very interesting faux "translation" of a nonexsistent prose precedent).And there is also "Histoire," perhaps the funniest sestina in the English language.This is a seduction narrative in which the repeated end-words are "Feminism," "Fascism," "Militarism," Marxism-Leninism," "Sexism," and "Racism."It's amazing to read this sestina and watch such words get drained of their meaning yet strangely re-energized. ... Read more

Product Description
Charting the Here of There contains a world of French-American exchange--a world governed by back-and-forth, double conciousness, and the magic inherent in translation and mistranslation, as well as the fantastic, poetic mystery and possibility that comes out of this articulation "across the pond." Writers Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli document the high points of this ongoing exchange as it has written itself on the pages of French and American literary magazines from 1850 letterpresses through present-day web-based publishing. The result is an impeccable overview of a production that testifies to the undeniable, often indefinable bond that joins French and American poetry. The authors survey the past 150 years of transatlantic contact, making the case that literary magazines have served as the telegraph/telephone/e-mail connection for a variety of literary dialogues, permitting, with relative speed and facility, the transmission of poetry and the poetic impulse. Charting the Here of There examines the ephemeral, periodic quality of the "little review" and how it has provided a unique forum for the sustained exchange of ideas that continue to inform the writing of French and American poets. This volume is a companion to the New York Public Library exhibition Reviews of Two Worlds: French-American Literary Periodicals, 1945-2000.

By Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli.
Interviews with John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Serge Fauchereau, Ron Padgett, Jacques Darras, Bill Zavatsky, Yves di Manno, Joseph Guglielmi, Jacques Roubaud, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claude Royet-Journoud, Pierre Joris, Michel Bulteau, Norma Cole, Cole Swenson, Stacy Doris and Juliete Valéry.
Afterword Rodney Phillips.

Paperback, 7 x 10 in. 166 pages, 108 b/w illustrations ... Read more

Product Description
A charming, quirky look at one hundred New York shop windows and interiors.

From Manhattan mainstays like Katz's Delicatessen and Macy's to idiosyncratic emporiums such as the 99¢ Store on East 14th Street or Dr. Rico Perez's drugstore in the Bronx, here are some of New York's most delightful and eye-catching shops and their display windows. Some of these windows feature collapsing heaps of merchandise, while goods in others are neatly stacked and arranged with a traditional shopkeeper's precision, creating geometric patterns out of everyday objects.

Juxtaposed with each photograph is the store's business card, which details its name and location so the reader can track down his or her favorites.

While chain stores do exist in New York, the city still offers a myriad of independent, one-of-a-kind shops. This delightful survey will appeal equally to New Yorkers and the city's visitors. 200 color illustrations. ... Read more

Product Description
‘Desperately seeking Suzanne’ is the watchword these seven writers seem to have chosen . . . They’ve joined together to breathe life into a single fictional character (Susanna, Suzy, Sue—in short Suzanne) at different moments in her life. They began with a minimal set of particulars: name, place and date of birth, parents’ professions, height, and distinguishing marks. And as a sculptor layers plaster onto a wire skeleton, so these authors fleshed out the basic administrative details, modeling to his her taste the changing contours of Suzanne in seven acts.

The result is seven sequences that come together like a patchwork quilt, in which each piece retains its individual tone while forming part of a harmonious whole. The unity of the text also stems from the network of correspondences between the various chapters: key phrases taken up and modified from one story to the next; winks and nods from one author to his neighbor’s work, or even to his own. These variations on an identity card read like a joyful exercise in style by seven authors in total complicity."-Le Monde ... Read more

Product Description
A companion to THE HUMAN COUNTRY: NEW AND COLLECTEDSTORIES, this volume contains all of Harry Mathews’s nonfiction. Theseastonishing essays cover a wide range of literary topics, includingdiscussions of complex musical forms and Oulipian techniques, toinsightful commentaries on the works of Lewis Carroll, RaymondRoussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, and Georges Perec. Throughoutthe collection Mathews examines the relationship between form andliterature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with intelligence,grace, and humor for the importance of artifice. ... Read more