The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Harry Mathews Number

Elmwood Park, Ill.: Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1987. First Edition. Small quarto in b&w pictorial wraps; 272 pages: illustrations; 23 cm Very good(+); tight and clean with minor foxing to edges & preliminaries; external wear, chiefly to edges. . Paperback.

Uncommon. Includes work by Mathews, as well as contributions by John Ashberry, George Perec, Barret Watten, Barbara Guest, and many others. // Harry Mathews (1930–2017) was an American writer whose work bridged experimental American and European traditions. He co-founded the avant-garde journal Locus Solus in 1960 with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, aligning with the New York School while later becoming the only American member of the French Oulipo group. His fiction—The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, and Cigarettes—is characterized by formal ingenuity and linguistic play, often employing Oulipian constraints. Also a poet and translator, he rendered works by Georges Perec and his wife Marie Chaix into English.