Singular Pleasures

A “cool, humorous, and affectionate” book of vignettes about a practice both universal and universally taboo: masturbation.

In sixty-one vignettes, Harry Mathews records the imaginative varieties of this solitary activity in prose that is playful, intimate, urgent, quirky, and humane. The soloists range in age from nine to eighty; the locales from Australia to Zaire; the means of masturbation from the commonplace to the bizarre. The young man in Gaza with his hair dryers, the woman in Manila with her cello bow, the long-eared bat, the charioteer, the candelabra—this swirl of unlikely individuals and objects is brought together in such a way that it floods a world born fresh once more. 

“There is nothing pornographic, in the strict sense, about Mathews' text, since it does not seek to arouse the reader,” wrote John Ash for Artforum. “His intention is to leave us deeply impressed by the ingenuity, tenacity, and inventiveness with which humans in all places and at all ages have pursued their own pleasure. He succeeds completely.” In this light-hearted collection, Mathews underscores the essential generosity of an apparently scandalous enterprise, where in the act of making love with ourselves we throw our imaginations open to a union with anything the universe itself has fended and fostered into being. The book is illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathews's fictions.