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.

Lucy Sante's books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and I Heard Her Call My Name. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

"Haunting ... In Mr. Mathews's most subtly experimental novel, the plot is used as bait to lure us into confronting love's darker side." -The New York Times

"[Harry Mathews] rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett and Joyce." --The Paris Review

"An intricate web of relationships ripples by degrees and permutations; a winning formula for any saga. I'm hooked and gotta know who ends up with who, versus who ends up worm food." --Style Weekly

"This book is remarkable, as involving as a nineteenth-century saga and as original as any modernist invention--a rare combination of readability and ingenuity. In Cigarettes, Mathews has forged his most expressive style." --Edmund White

"Virginia Woolf said we read fiction like gossip, or at least, Eve Babitz said Virginia Woolf said that. Harry Mathews writes fiction like gossip." --Hazlitt