By Harry Mathews
Introduction by Nicholas Delbanco
Paperback: 9781628976755
eBook: 9781628976762
Publication Date: November 17th, 2026
Description
A “comic extravaganza” (Washington Post Book World) from one of the most acclaimed voices in American avant-garde literature, Tlooth follows its narrator on a fantastical, globe-trotting quest for revenge.
Opening on a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth is absurdist from the jump. The narrator, a three-fingered dental assistant who escapes from Russia to find the criminal surgeon who took the other two fingers, treks across half the world—from Kabul to Venice to Milan to India to Morocco to Rome to France—in pursuit of revenge. From page to outrageous page, Mathews constructs a labyrinth of language, rife with the arcane puzzles, mesmerizing digressions, and nested stories that would become hallmarks of his oeuvre.
Praise
“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
Biographical Note
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.
Nicholas Delbanco received his BA from Harvard and his MA from Columbia University. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he directed the MFA program in creative writing and the Hopwood Awards. An editor and author of more than twenty books, Delbanco has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent books are Still Life at Eighty, a memoir, and Reprise: The Collected Stories.