Three Times Time: 3 Short Stories by Jack Matthews
About this ebook
During his career as a writer, Mr. Matthews was distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades. Winner of Guggenheim and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award. His own books have been praised by Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Ann Grau, Tim O’Brien, Doris Grumbach, Walker Percy and a host of other famous and highly accomplished authors.
"Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, New York Times)
"Matthews' always graceful prose finds that precise telling detail. It's easy to fall in love with such writing." (Perry Glasser, North American Review)
"Engaging wit and irony have been characteristic of Matthews's writing from the start, and both are strongly present in his latest gatherings of stories. His irony is increasingly darker, however, and his characters' obsession with memory and its distortions plays a more dominant role in this later work, much of which deals with death. For the most part, these are stories with deceptively simple and ordinary surfaces, but they are driven by powerful and ominous undercurrents, which often fuse the local and regional with the archetypal. Few can do it better. Without question, Matthews has established himself as one of America's finest storytellers." (Stanley Lindberg, editor, Georgia Review)
About the author
"Literature is the least pure of all the arts, and that is its richness and power. It's a temporal art like a symphony; it has periodicities, it has rhythms - prose itself has sound, it evokes visual imagery like painting...." Jack Matthews, Interview 2010
Jack Matthews (22 July 1925 - 28 November 2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and former professor. He published 7 novels, 7 collections of short stories, a novella, and 8 volumes of essays. He was an avid book collector, and many of his book finds served as a basis for his essays and the historical topics he explored in his fiction. His 1972 novel The Charisma Campaigns was nominated by Walker Percy for the National Book Award. He has often made 19th century America and the Civil War period the setting for his fiction, starting with his 1981 novel Sassafras and most recently with the 2011 novel Gambler's Nephew (which tells the story of how an abolitionist accidentally kills an escaped slave). His plays have been performed at multiple theaters around the country. You can view the author website at http://www.ghostlypopulations.
