What do Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino have in common? The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle. Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais founded their "Workshop for Potential Literature" in 1960 to find out how abstract restrictions could be c
With the American publication of Life, a User's Manual in 1987, Georges Perec was immediately recognized in the U.S. as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in
Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.
Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ( Nothing ), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud poet, novelist, mathematician com
Devastated by the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but to continue living - writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in w
Set against the backdrop of Europe’s slide into Fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the gl
From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defe
