Cigarettes

Reviews / Votes

Cigarettes has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination. -- Gilbert Sorrentino A brilliant Jane Austen-like social comedy on the unfathomable nature of human relationships. -- Lanie Goodman Washington Post Book World A brilliant and unsettling book... Mathews weaves into each of his several story-threads more unexpected twists than you'll find in the average multi-volume Victorian novel. -- Tom Clark Los Angeles Times Book Review In Cigarettes, Mathews takes us more interestingly than ever into that unfinished work of art, the self, exposing powerful dependencies and subtleties in a cast of characters distinct and poised yet half-goping toward others and themselves. The plot, the tale, the laying bare, are intriguingly staged and timed in a novel as imaginative as it is disturbing. -- Joseph McElroy