"The Journalist is both a slightly surreal comedy of manners and a frightening parable on the carnivorous nature of the written word. It's Mathews's most stunning and approachable fiction so far." -- John Ashbery "Harry Mathews's journal-writer is the perfect avatar of civilization and its discontents, a creation both comic and profound, and, perhaps, a new direction for Mathews: it combines his always brilliant social observation with a sustained psychological portrait of great depth and interest." -- Diane Johnson "A truly novel and seductive and funny book. Stories, dreams, loves, the elegantly shaped and the humbly unhinged--all we expect from Harry Mathews's fiction comes together as never before. This is his finest work." -- Joseph McElroy "The Journalist is an extraordinary feat, combining new extremes of conceptual torture with a credible and all-too-human emotional core--in addition to being quite entertaining and absorbing." -- Lucy Sante "The complications offered up by Mr.

Mathews are both daunting and funny, in a kind of psychoslapstick way." -- New York Times "Harry Mathews invents ingenious formal patterns and combines them with unruly, even crazy, passion. Mad and rational, all head and too much heart, The Journalist explores the black, intricately organized interior of paranoia. Somehow the book also manages to portray a utopia of human goodness." -- Edmund White "Mathews is one of American literature's great idiosyncratic figures." --Susannah Hunnewell, The Paris Review.