Search results for ""author georges perec""

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

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'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order'One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world.One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

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Two trailblazing novels by Georges Perec, Things: Jerome and Sylvie, the young upwardly mobile couple, lust for the good life. They wanted life's enjoyment, but this equated to ownership. A Man Asleep: A nameless student attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambitions.

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Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

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In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...

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Translated into English for the first time, this is Georges Perec's unique, puzzling, and often imitated memoir. At once an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring pointillist autobiography, Georges Perec's / Remember is the last of this essential writer's major works to be translated into English. Consisting of 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with "I remember," and all limited to pieces of public knowledge - brand names and folk wisdom, actors and illnesses, places and things ("I remember: "When parents drink, children tipple"; "I remember Hermes handbags, with their tiny padlocks"; "I remember myxomatosis") - the book represents a secret key to the world of Perec's fiction. As critic, translator, and Perec biographer David Bellos notes in his introduction to this edition, since its original publication, "It's hardly possible to utter the words je me souviens in French these days without committing a literary allusion." As playful and puzzling as the best of Perec's novels, I Remember began as a simple writing exercise, and grew into an expansive, exhilarating work of art: the image of one unmistakable and irreplaceable life, shaped from the material of our collective past.

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"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.” –Ian Klaus, CityLab One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

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Things: A Story of the Sixties is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation.In A Man Asleep, a young student embarks upon a disturbing and exhaustive pursuit of indifference, following his experience in non-existence with relentless logic.

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Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: "I'll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I'll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk." An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is - in the words of David Bellos, the "faithful exegete" who brought it to light - "connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create - but it's not like anything else that he wrote".

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Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl's past starts to cast its malignant shadow. This virtuoso story, chock-full of plots and subplots, shows the skill of both author and translator who impart all the action without a crucial grammatical prop: the letter 'e'.

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Twelve years of Georges Perec’s annual pamphlets filled with homophonic wordplay “In the beginning was the pun,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. And so it was that Georges Perec brought the good word to his friends and acquaintances on a yearly basis, as an expression of his best wishes for the New Year. Wishes gathers together these ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, printed at his own expense in limited quantities. This paean to the pun consists of a series of short prose pieces, each concluding with a list of the everyday bits of language lying at their root. English proverbs, Latin phrases, the names of musicians, filmmakers, novelists and book titles are all fodder for Perec’s homophonic translations: John Coltrane turns into an anecdote about a wanderer with a severe ring around the collar; Antonioni’s first movie transforms into a prophecy of a murderous holiday; the phrase “All’s well that ends well” becomes a pregnant cow named Alice hailed by a drunk Satan; and Maurice Ravel proves to be a warning against corpses with a predilection for root vegetables. These texts and their marriage of sound to meaning present a challenge to any translation, and bring into stark relief the choices translators are often forced to make. This English edition sidesteps such choices, offering two alternate translations: a traditional one focused on the literal content of Perec’s texts, and another focused on their formal phonological play. Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to palindromes. Winner of the prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel, Things, and the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of Oulipo.

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'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

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An introduction to the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go by Oulipo members Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud Written by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics. As in the Oulipian strategy of writing under constraint, the role of structured gameplay (within literature and without) proves to be of primordial importance: a means of moving outside an inherent system, of instigating new figures of style and meaning, new paths toward collaboration and new strategies for filling a space: be it the space of a terrain, a blank page, a white screen or a freshly stretched canvas. Translated for the first time, this treatise outlines the history of Go, the rules for playing it, some central tactics and strategies for playing it and overcoming the threats posed by an opponent, general information and trivia, and a glossary that ranges from Atari (check) to Yose (the end of a match). Pierre Lusson (born 1950) is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France. Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.” Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of mathematics at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart and The Loop.

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Celebrated as the man who wrote an entire novel without using the letter 'e', and another in the form of a vast jigsaw puzzle, Georges Perec found humour - and pathos - in the human need for arrangement and classification. The essays in Thoughts of Sorts explore the rules by which we find a place in the world. Is thinking a kind of sorting? Is sorting a kind of thought?

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Georges Perec, employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 to 1954, arrived as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is wide-awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: “To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up.” Ellis Island is a slender Perec masterwork, unique among his many singular works. The acclaimed poet and scholar Mónica de la Torre contributes an afterword that keeps Perec's writing front and center while situating Ellis Island in the context of America’s current fierce battles over immigration.

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