20 Lines a Day

For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal’s dictum for writers of “twenty lines a day, genius or not.” What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer’s manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews’s life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.