Joing us at 192 Books for a reading and conversation centering Harry Mathews’ Tlooth. Introduction writer and author of Reprise, Nicholas Delcanco, will be joined by Ed Park, the introduction writer of The Conversions, and Lucy Sante, the introduction writer of Cigarettes.
A “comic extravaganza” (Washington Post Book World) from one of the most acclaimed voices in American avant-garde literature, Tlooth follows its narrator on a fantastical, globe-trotting quest for revenge.
Opening on a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth is absurdist from the jump. The narrator, a three-fingered dental assistant who escapes from Russia to find the criminal surgeon who took the other two fingers, treks across half the world—from Kabul to Venice to Milan to India to Morocco to Rome to France—in pursuit of revenge. From page to outrageous page, Mathews constructs a labyrinth of language, rife with the arcane puzzles, mesmerizing digressions, and nested stories that would become hallmarks of his oeuvre.
Harry Mathews was born in New York City in 1930 and spent his adult life in the United States and in France, where he co-founded the influential journal Locus Solus with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in 1961. He was the first American member of the literary consortium Oulipo, alongside Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. His many writings, spanning novels, short fiction, poems, essays, and translations from the French, include The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Cigarettes, The Journalist, My Life in CIA, and The Solitary Twin. Mathews was honored by the French government as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2017.
Nicholas Delbanco received his BA from Harvard and his MA from Columbia University. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he directed the MFA program in creative writing and the Hopwood Awards. An editor and author of more than twenty books, Delbanco has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent books are Still Life at Eighty, a memoir, and Reprise: The Collected Stories.
Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in New York.
Lucy Sante's books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and I Heard Her Call My Name. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.