Conversions

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. Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in New York.

"At its heart, the novel is a literary puzzle that questions the nature and meaning of the holy grail as a literary convention, a historical ritual, and the legitimizing force behind kingly power. Indeed, The Conversions is an ode to illimitable meaning, an exuberant experiment in storytelling, and a surreal wonderland of the obscure—'combinatorial literature' at its trippiest." —Foreword Reviews, Starred Review