Cigarettes

by Harry Mathews, Lucy Sante (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628976076
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Lucy Sante's books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and I Heard Her Call My Name. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

What People are Saying About This

Edmund White

This book is remarkable, as involving as a 19th—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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

This book is remarkable, as involving as a 19th-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

In Cigarettes, Mathews takes us more interestingly than ever into that unfinished work of art, the self, exposing powerful dependencies and subtleties in a cast of characters distinct and poised yet half-groping toward others and themselves. The plot, the tale, the laying bare, are intriguingly stages and timed in a novel as imaginative as it is disturbing.

Joseph McElroy

Harry Mathews is the only American author I know whose utter originality does not erode his heart and his content. Cigarettes is odd, skillful, touching, wide, cultured, and engrossing.

Ned Rorem

Cigarettes has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination.

Gilbert Sorrentino

Cigarettes is a dazzling formal triumph that effortlessly charts the interlocking fates of fourteen pairs of relationshipsin early-1960s Greenwich village, in gleaming, fastidious prose.

New City

A brilliant and unsettling book. . . . Mathews weaves into each of his several story-threads more unexpected twists than youll find in the average multi-volume Victorian noveal.

Tom Clark— Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

A brilliant and unsettling book.... Mathews weaves into each of his several story-threads more unexpected twists than you'll find in the average multi-volume Victorian novel.

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Tom Clark

A brilliant Jane Austen-like social comedy on the unfathomable nature of human relationships.

Washington Post Book World - Lanie Goodman