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The Journalist, The (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Harry Matthews
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Description for The Journalist, The (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Paperback. Num Pages: 256 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 216 x 140 x 19. Weight in Grams: 338.
A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them. The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for worry: his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
1997
Publisher
Dalkey Archive Press
Condition
New
Number of Pages
256
Place of Publication
Normal, IL, United States
ISBN
9781564781659
SKU
V9781564781659
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Harry Matthews
Marie Chaix was born in Lyons and raised in Paris, and is the author of nine books. The Summer of the Elder Tree, a memoir and meditation on the theme of separation, and her first book in more than a decade, was published in Paris in 2005, and will appear from Dalkey Archive Press in 2013. Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Editions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
Reviews for The Journalist, The (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
"The Journalist is essentially a reworking of Michel Butor's classic nouveau roman, Degres (1960)."
Library Journal
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