Harry Mathews

A man is told by his doctor to start keeping a diary, it could cure his depressions. The patient follows the advice and in no time he is off pills. Only now he becomes addicted to his journal, fretting and fussing as he organizes and re-organizes the entries. By the author of Singular Pleasures.

"Composed of a series of letters between a husband and wife, the Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is a comedy about love and longing, dashed hopes and frustrations, and trying to make connections. Newly wedded Zachary McCaltex (a librarian from Miami) and Twang Panattapam (originally from the Southeast-Asian country of Pan-Nam, but residing in Italy) try to trace the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century, even while they navigate a relationship separated by an ocean as well as by their different cultures. In the end, the postal service may be responsible for what gets lost (including Zachary's sanity) along the way."--BOOK JACKET.

First published in 1977, Selected Declarations of Dependence has, like all the books by Harry Mathews, grown in reputation over the years of its unavailability. Sun & Moon Press now returns this remarkable text to print with a new introduction and the original Alex Katz illustrations. Selected Declarations of Dependence is based on a set of forty-six familiar proverbs, used and abused in various ways. The proverbs provide the entire vocabulary of the opening story, "Their Words, For You." In the section called "Perverbs and Paraphrases," Mathews explores the narrative implications of the crossed proverb or "perverb," in which two regular proverbs are mixed ("A rolling stone leads to Rome."). The remaining uses of proverbs and perverbs and the "Sorites" - which bows to Lewis Carroll's demonstration of the form - all produce an hilarious text of familiar quotations gone amuck and reveal Mathews' involvement with the Oulipo.

"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."--Jacket. 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.

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 late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic.

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?

Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in Paris, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.

James Parker won't give up on his wife, Bella.Not after everything they've been through together. What started as an unlikely marriage between a blue blood and a rebel blossomed like the gardens Bella cultivates.But she can't remember any of it. Miles from home, afflicted with amnesia, she's safe in the care of a kind doctor--and safe from the memory of the betrayal that made her leave. Now it's up to James to remind her of their wonderful life together, to help her fall in love again...and to help her find the way home.