The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays »

A companion to The Human Country: New and Collected Stories, this volume contains all of Harry Mathews s nonfiction. These astonishing essays cover a wide range of literary topics, including discussion of complex musical forms and Oulipian techniques, to insightful commentaries on the works of Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, Joseph McElroy, and Georges Perec. Throughout the collection Mathews examines the relationship between form and literature in a lucid, intimate voice, arguing with intelligence, grace, and humor for the importance of artifice.

The Washington Post

I keep returning to Mathews because his work is so absolutely distinctive and original. Happily, too, Dalkey Archive Press has reissued nearly all his books, gathering together his essays in The Case of the Persevering Maltese and his shorter fiction in The Human Country. The essays include patient explications of the works that have inspired Mathews's admiration or emulation: Laura Riding's Progress of Stories, Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, the work of Raymond Roussel and Isidore Ducasse (a k a le Comte de Maldoror), Kenneth Koch's The Duplications, Raymond Queneau's The Skin of Dreams and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. More general pieces address the nature of writing, the work of the OULIPO, the practice of translation, and the relationship of words to music in opera and song. — Michael Dirda