American writer Harry Mathews, "a longtime editor of the Paris Review who was best known for his novels My Life in CIA and The Conversions," and "who helped bring French novelist Georges Perec to worldwide notice," died January 25, the Nation reported. He was 86. Mathews "was also the only American to have been admitted to Oulipo, a celebrated experimental group of French writers and mathematicians who believe constrained writing techniques are the key to invention," the Nation wrote. His many books include Cigarettes; Tlooth; The New Tourism; Journalist; and The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays.
The Paris Review noted that, in Mathews, it "has lost one of its most faithful and best-loved contributors, a writer we've worked with for more than 50 years--beginning in 1962, when we ran an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. Now, in our new Spring issue, we'll publish an excerpt from the novel he just finished, The Solitary Twin."
In a 2007 interview for the Paris Review's Art of Fiction series, Mathews told publisher Susannah Hunnewell: "I've always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.
"I suppose I must have had dreams of greater recognition, but I've always had the audience I wanted, and that was the audience that reads poetry. What I want is enthusiasm among friends and their friends, people who I know are serious readers."