There are writers who can draw out a yarn like Scheherazade, perhaps in some vain hope that the contours and detours of a discursive story might forestall death as it had on those thousand and one ...

Harry Mathews, the great Oulipo initiate (America’s only), completed his skinny, astonishing novel The Solitary Twin in Paris just six months before he died last year, at the age of 86. The Oulipo ...

Dalkey Archive Press, an imprint of Deep Vellum Publishing, will reissue 10 works of fiction and nonfiction by American writer Harry Mathews over the next five years. The publishing program will kick ...

Multiple meanings always simmer under the surface of Harry Mathews’s writing, but in The Solitary Twin, they’re more hidden. Harry Mathews, 1983. (Photograph by Rollie McKenna. Courtesy of Center for ...

“Nobody connected with the agency calls it ‘the CIA.’ It’s plain ‘CIA.’ ” With this piece of apparent insider info, supposedly given to the author from a friendly informant, Harry Mathews launches ...

“Who can trust a novelist?” The question, posed early in Harry Mathews’s My Life in CIA, befits a book that willfully tests the limits of the reader’s credulity. A semi-fictionalized (or perhaps ...

ordsworth's best-known and arguably most ridiculous poem is "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the one about the daffodils. When daffodils are blooming, it is impossible not to think of this ...

Harry Mathews, air traffic controller, flight instructor, and pilot, was blessed with two great loves. As a youth, Mathews’ grandmother knew how to grab his attention. “She had a way of making Bible ...