Oulipians Have More Fun [Life A User's Manual: Part 3]
Back when the Life A User’s Manual Big Read first started,1 I referenced this huge chart of constraints that served as Perec’s guide in constructing this novel.2 At the time, the only constraint I mentioned was the “Knight’s Move,” which determines the chapter order of the novel. But as you can ...
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Cons and Quests; Things and Violence [Life A User's Manual: Part 2]
A few weeks back, I posted about the first section of Life A User’s Manual (TRANSLATED BY DAVID BELLOS), which is the Spring Big Read over at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading blog. As mentioned, I love Life, haven’t read it in years, and had every intention of keeping up with this reading group and ...
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Life A User's Manual and LOST and Pynchon [Perec Reading Group: Week 1]
As mentioned a couple of times already, Conversational Reading is currently hosting a Group Read of Life A User’s Manual. This project officially kicked off yesterday with the first Part (up to page 89), and since I’m actually on schedule with this (although with nothing else), I thought I’d participate by ...
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Perec and "Matrix Literature"
Susan Bernofsky’s very interesting post about David Bellos’s very interesting comments about this very interesting sounding book is yet one more reason to rush out and start reading (and rereading) Perec: David Bellos spoke at NYU’s Maison Française last night, presenting his new translation of ...
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I'm All in in a Very Big Way
One of my all-time favorite books is Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, and for months years, I’ve been meaning to reread it. Well, starting sometime soon, Conversational Reading will be hosting a Big Read of Perec’s classic novel. No real info up there yet, but as soon as the schedule is ...
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This Is Cool
A couple weeks ago, J. Peder Zane asked me to contribute to his Top Ten Books project featuring top ten lists from a bunch of famous writers. I was going to do an all translations list, but ended up just listing ten of my favorite books since 1950. (And I’ll admit right now that this list is unstable. Within five ...
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And Let Us Now Praise Georges Perec
Yesterday’s afternoon mail brought with it two Georges Perec books that Godine just brought out: a new edition of Life A User’s Manual and Thoughts of Sorts, a collection of essays published posthumously in France in 1985. And which, according to the jacket copy, “completes the Godine list of ...
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