20 Lines a Day
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Published:21st Dec '89
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
"20 Lines a Day might be considered an exercise in constrictive form... Though written in the self-preoccupied, matter-of-fact voice of everyday mulling, it has the irony and symmetry of a parable." -- San Francisco Chronicle "I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing--John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon--but none so strong as this." -- Thomas Disch "Despite the fact that these lines are exercises, they are more than simple jottings. They offer the reflections of genius; they will be read (and reread) for more than one day, for more than one year. They are 'lasting.'" -- Irving Malin, Hollins Critic
ISBN: 9781564781680
Dimensions: 139mm x 214mm x 10mm
Weight: 208g
134 pages