• Comment
  • Print
  • Email
  • Share

20 Lines a Day


Paperback
Price: $10.95 $8.76 Save $2.19 (20%)
Add to shopping cart
 

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.

Details

ISBN-10 1564781682
ISBN-13 9781564781680
Publication Date Jan 1988
Nb of pages 134
Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Reviews

Press Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle
20 Lines a Day might be considered an exercise in constrictive form. . . . Though written in the self-preoccupied, matter-of-fact voice of everyday mulling, it has the irony and symmetry of a parable.

American Book Review
Weighted by sadness, 20 Lines is caliginous, edgy, and worrisome. . . . Mathews frequently is wise, as when he peers inward at the fluttery life of his own mind. Out of the pattern of one's routines comes clues to how life might best be lived.

New Pages
We all may see moments of ourselves here, as well as many revealing glimpses of Mathews' day-to-day life, but what we can only get a feel for—and . . . get it here as nowhere else—is how a man
...more


Hollins Critic
Despite the fact that these lines are exercises, they are more than simple jottings. They offer the reflections of genius; they will be read (and reread) for more than one day, for more than one year. They are 'lasting.'

WE ALSO SUGGEST

Paradoxes of Peace, or The Presence of Infinity
Nicholas Mosley
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this.

other titles related to
• Countries : United States of America
• Genres : Fiction : Movements and Schools
• Genres : Fiction : Movements and Schools : Oulipo
• Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada
• Genres : Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs


top