George Perec, trans. from the French by David Bellos. Univ. of Chicago, $20 (144p) ISBN 978-0-226-05425-4 In this absurdist thriller by the late Perec (Life: A User's Manual), written in 1960, an art ...

One of France’s most daring postwar writers, perhaps best known for writing an entire novel without the letter “e” (a lipogram), French-Jewish author Georges Perec, is coming back into vogue. Two of ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Georges Perec is one of the most remarkable French writers of the postwar period and his masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual, that ...

And so another “lost” first book, rejected by publishers and left in a suitcase, appears. But this time it is different. Georges Perec’s debut is virtuosic in execution and is not merely a curiosity ...

The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo.

One feature of the condition — this acceptable mania — is that we crave everything our favourite authors have written. We want that suitcase of manuscripts that Hadley Hemingway lost. We want ...

• A Nation puzzle solver’s blog where you can ask for and offer hints.] Writing cryptic clues is a form of constrained writing. To begin with, for each entry, one has to include both definition and ...

Beyond the importance of food and eating in Perec's works, appears an analogy, between the art of cooking and that of writing, which owes much to Proust — not so much to the edibility of Proust's work ...

When I attempt to state what I have tried to do as a writer since I began, what occurs to me first of all is that I have never written two books of the same kind, nor ever wanted to reuse a formula, ...

Georges Perec was 75 last month. It needs to be said that he died in 1982; but there are many ways in which he is still alive. Shortly after his death, a planet was named after him (a small one, ...

• A Nation-puzzle solver’s blog where you can ask for and offer hints, and where every one of our clues is explained in great detail.] That essay’s introductory paragraphs are perhaps the best summary ...