Watching Screwball Comedies with Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews.

Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us ­poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of his own devising. From 1989 until 2003, Harry served as our Paris editor. In 2007, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, . As she wrote in her introduction, “After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to , Jane Austen, and . Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic, was going to press. —The Paris Review