Cigarettes
Harry Mathews author Lucy Sante editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Published:31st Jul '25
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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.
Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, 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 did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel—and be right and wrong on both counts.
With a new introduction by Lucy Sante, Cigarettes returns to print in full force: a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.
"Haunting ... In Mr. Mathews's most subtly experimental novel, the plot is used as bait to lure us into confronting love's darker side." —The New York Times
"[Harry Mathews] rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett and Joyce.” —The Paris Review
"An intricate web of relationships ripples by degrees and permutations; a winning formula for any saga. I’m hooked and gotta know who ends up with who, versus who ends up worm food." —Style Weekly
"This book is remarkable, as involving as a nineteenth-century saga and as original as any modernist invention—a rare combination of readability and ingenuity. In Cigarettes, Mathews has forged his most expressive style." —Edmund White
"Virginia Woolf said we read fiction like gossip, or at least, Eve Babitz said Virginia Woolf said that. Harry Mathews writes fiction like gossip." —Hazlitt
ISBN: 9781628976076
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
300 pages