The Human Country

The only American member of the Oulipo -- a literary movement whose members have included major European figures such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Roubaud, and Italo Calvino -- Harry Mathews has distinguished himself among his contemporaries as a stylist whose prose is both elegant and inventive, erudite and hilarious, sophisticated yet lucidly drawn. The Human Country collects all of Mathews's shorter fiction, including the early stories from Country Cooking, the mid-career stories from The American Experience, and ten recent, previously uncollected pieces that are every bit as brilliant and surprising. These stories include "The Broadcast," in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock; "Clocking the World on Cue," an Oulipian story that employs the centuries-old literary form of the Chronogram; and "Calibrations of Latitude," which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless journey (through the city and through his imagination) that in the end proves not aimless at all, but It her -- like all of Mathews's work -- purposeful and deeply moving.