The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose

Front Cover
Atlas Press, 1999 - Fiction - 213 pages
Fiction. As the only English-speaking member of OULIPO, the School of Potential Literature, Harry Mathews has long been hailed as one of the most unique voices in American fiction writing. THE WAY HOME collects Country Cooking in Central France, perhaps the longest and most extravagant recipe ever concocted; Singular Pleasures, an unabashed chronicle of masturbation by both sexes; The Orchard, Mathews' stark, beautiful tribute to his friend, the late Georges Perec; Armenian Papers, a sequence of wartime prose poems; the essay Translation and the Oulipo; The Way Home, derived from a series of drawings by Trevor Winkfield (included in the text); and Autobiography, in which Mathews tells his own life story entirely in terms of other people.

From inside the book

Contents

Preface
7
The Way Home
27
Notes
91
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1999)

Harry Mathews was born in New York City on February 14, 1930. He attended Princeton University in 1947, but left in his sophomore year to join the United States Navy. Once his military service was completed, he received a B.A. in music from Harvard University in 1952. He was the only American to become a member of Oulipo, an experimental group of French writers and mathematicians who believe constrained writing techniques are the key to invention. He was an author and editor of the Paris Review literary magazine. His novels included The Conversions, My Life in CIA, and The Solitary Twin. He died on January 25, 2017 at the age of 86.

Bibliographic information