Tlooth

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.

“Tlooth presents the reader with cornucopia of improbable inventions, bizarre artefacts, linguistic riddles and mind-boggling discoveries, all recounted in a studiedly neutral tone that is at once lucid, precise and wholly unrevealing of its author’s ‘psychology.’” —London Review of Books“A brilliant book, in a very special way… While the method of telling it is quite sober, and the language plain, what actually happens is totally bizarre and wonderful. The descriptions that are blandly handed to you show an imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing. The details are sometimes very savage and scabrous. But the book has nothing to do with modish sick humor... It is, for all its incidental excesses, fantasy, pure and simple… This is a journey worth taking.” —Harper’s“[A] cross between The Crying of Lot 49 and Wim Wenders’s Until The End of the World—a nested set of stories disrupting a quest underwritten by a revenge plot which wanders across the globe.” —Paul A. Harris