Tlooth
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press
Publishing:31st Dec '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 31st December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A “comic extravaganza” (Washington Post Book World) from one of the most acclaimed voices in American avant-garde literature, Tlooth follows its narrator on a fantastical, globe-trotting quest for revenge.
Opening on a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth is absurdist from the jump. The narrator, a three-fingered dental assistant who escapes from Russia to find the criminal surgeon who took the other two fingers, treks across half the world—from Kabul to Venice to Milan to India to Morocco to Rome to France—in pursuit of revenge. From page to outrageous page, Mathews constructs a labyrinth of language, rife with the arcane puzzles, mesmerizing digressions, and nested stories that would become hallmarks of his oeuvre.
“Tlooth presents the reader with cornucopia of improbable inventions, bizarre artefacts, linguistic riddles and mind-boggling discoveries, all recounted in a studiedly neutral tone that is at once lucid, precise and wholly unrevealing of its author’s ‘psychology.’” —London Review of Books
“A brilliant book, in a very special way . . . While the method of telling it is quite sober, and the language plain, what actually happens is totally bizarre and wonderful. The descriptions that are blandly handed to you show an imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing. The details are sometimes very savage and scabrous. But the book has nothing to do with modish sick humor... It is, for all its incidental excesses, fantasy, pure and simple . . . This is a journey worth taking.” —Harper’s
“[A] cross between The Crying of Lot 49 and Wim Wenders’s Until The End of the World—a nested set of stories disrupting a quest underwritten by a revenge plot which wanders across the globe.” —Paul A. Harris
ISBN: 9781628976755
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages