It is 1936, and Albert B. is one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party. During the war, he becomes a collaborator. It's only a matter of time before he dons a German uniform himself.

Taking place in the limbo between the moment of Albert's initial “fall” and his inevitable capture, following the Allied invasion of Mainau, The Laurels of Lake Constance is the story not only of Albert himself, but of his daughter, who must endure the paradox of loving a man whose beliefs and allegiances are nothing short of catastrophic. Beautifully translated by novelist Harry Mathews, The Laurels of Lake Constance is a profoundly moving story about both war and childhood, and their intersection in one household, conjured in all its details, be they beautiful or shameful: a resigned mother playing music, a father absent, an era frozen in a tragic fresco where novelistic detail mixes with history.

A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she’s going to die. Becoming the sleeper’s shadow, the woman’s daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life with her husband. By assembling her memories of the dying woman, gluing together scraps of recollections like puzzle pieces, Marie Chaix reconstructs the portrait of a woman who she deeply loved—a blurred silhouette forever fixed in that “museum of dust” where each life ends.

Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.

My Life in CIA documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during 1973, where amid charged world events—the coup in Chile, Watergate, the ending of the Vietnam War—he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies were interested in him for their own dubious purposes. Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller that relentlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction.

A companion to The Human Country: New and collected Stories, this volume collects all of Harry Mathews's non-fiction, including an astonishing range of essays which discuss everything from complex literary and musical forms to the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, George Perec and the OuLiPo. Throughout the collection, Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with erudition, grace and humour for the importance of artifice.

The Human Country collects all of Mathews's shorter fiction, including the early stories from Country Cooking, the mid-career stories from The American Experience, and ten recent, previously uncollected pieces that are every bit as brilliant and surprising. These stories include 'The Broadcast,' in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock; 'Clocking the World on Cue,' an Oulipian story that employs the centuries-old literary form of the Chronogram; and 'Calibration of Latitude,' which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless journey (through the city and through his imagination) that in the end proves not aimless at all, but rather - like all of Mathews's work - purposeful and deeply moving.

Poetry/Prose. Translated from the German by Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton, and Rosmarie Waldrop. 'An Oskar-Pastior-poem is like life. As soon as you think you've got hold of it, it has already moved you ahead by the fraction of a hair'-Klaus Hensel. 'For Pastior, language itself is the stuff of life.He explores it through puns, lists, strings, heaps, fields, dictionaries, alphabets, collage, montage, potpourris-all in orgiastic expansion. The result is 'thought-music as a leaping perspective'-a perspective, in which a successful 'nonsensical' text like 'ur-cur trusts sulfur baths: plush' (p. 90) 'is infinitely more precise than this kind of statement''-from the Introductory Note by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Composed of a series of letters between a husband and wife, the Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is a comedy about love and longing, dashed hopes and frustrations, and trying to make connections. Newly wedded Zachary McCaltex (a librarian from Miami) and Twang Panattapam (originally from the Southeast-Asian country of Pan-Nam, but residing in Italy) try to trace the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century, even while they navigate a relationship separated by an ocean as well as by their different cultures. In the end, the postal service may be responsible for what gets lost (including Zachary's sanity) along the way.

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist.
When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. As we have come to expect from a Harry Mathews novel, nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, but we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic pointed out, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel -- and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness

As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the narrator's entries become more and more detailed and increasingly bizarre, especially as he begins to devise elaborate classification systems for his unwieldy materials. Since these entries require more and more of his time, he begins to withdraw from family and friends, entering a world perfectly ordered, organized, and utterly weird.

For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal's dictum for writers of 'twenty lines a day, genius or not.' What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer's manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews's life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast of an uncharted French island.