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› Find signed collectible books: '20 Lines a Day'

› Find signed collectible books: '53 Days'
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› Find signed collectible books: '99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bark Tree'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blue Flowers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cigarettes'
Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel - and be right and wrong on both counts. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Conversions'
At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast of an uncharted French island.
A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cosmicomics'
An enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Calvino makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms -- and have time for a love life. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Disparition'
"Il fallait un grand art, un art hors du commun, pour fourbir tout un roman sans ça." "Ça", comprenez ce "rond pas tout à fait clos finissant par un trait horizontal". Il fallait substituer, combiner sans trêve et sans faillir, sans céder à la ronde tentation d'utiliser... la lettre "e" ! "Mais pourquoi donc ?", s'exclament les sceptiques et les désabusés. Et Perec de citer un obscur Ramun Quayno : "L'on n'inscrit pas pour assombrir la population." "Qui frappe-t-on d'omission ?", demandent les offusqués et les inquisiteurs ? Le motif du tapis, le cinquième volume d'une collection d'in-folios, Anton Voyl lui-même, le protagoniste, tout, tout doit disparaître sous la plume-baguette de Perec ! Voilà qui suscite auprès dudit M. Voyl quelques suées kafkaïennes, des hallucinations rocambolesques et une imagination pour le moins aventurière...
Après la publication des Choses, son premier roman (1965), Georges Perec rejoint l'Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) qui l'incite à multiplier les défis formels tels que celui de La Disparition ou de Alphabets (176 onzains hétérogrammatiques). --Laure Anciel [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eunoia'
Christian Bök embarks on an ambitious exercise in Eunoia, an avant-garde work in which each chapter uses only one vowel, creating a text that fluctuates between poetry and prose. To make things more difficult, Bök constrained himself further: all chapters must allude to the art of writing, and they must describe a culinary banquet, a bawdy episode, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage. This aesthetic style pays tribute to French writer Georges Perec, whose novel A Void was written (and then translated) without the letter "e."
Ultimately, Eunoia--the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels, it literally means "beautiful thinking"--is a taxing reading experience rife with repetition, although the author's vocabulary is nothing short of extraordinary. Chapter "E" comes across the smoothest: "Whenever Helen enters Hell's deepest recesses, she sees Hell's meekest dwellers. She meets the repenters, never redeemed." "U" is entertaining: "Ubu fluffs Lulu's tutu. Ubu cups Lulu's dugs; Ubu rubs Lulu's buns; thus Lulu must pull Ubu's pud." Despite the feeling of constraint that permeates the work, there are episodes of perfectly manicured and musical prose sprinkled with endearing onomatopoeia. At the end, the author explains that the text makes a "Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought." His assertion is true: Bök's technique draws the reader's attention away from the narrative to the form and then back again, conveying real ideas with a mathematical beauty of language. --Leah Eichler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eunoia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Exercises in Style'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Georges Perec: A Life in Words'
The first complete biography of the author of "Life A User's Manual". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How I Wrote Certain Of My Books'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Human Country'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invisible Cities'
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Journalist'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Choses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life'
Set in a Paris apartment block, this novel describes in minute detail the lives of the inhabitants and the apartments they inhabit at a specific moment in time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mcsweeney's 22'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Life In Cia: A Chronicle Of 1973'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Never Again'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Odile'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature'
An anthology of writing by members of the group Oulipo. The Oulipians view imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by constraints, attempting to write stories in which strict rules are imposed and followed. Providing a contribution to literary theory and a guide to writers and students of creative writing. Originally published in 1986. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oulipo Compendium'
Poetry. Make Now Press of Los Angeles and Atlas Press of London have released a revised and updated edition of The OULIPO COMPENDIUM in a limited edition print run of 1,000 copies to be released from Los Angeles and 1,000 copies to be released from London. THE OULIPO COMPENDIUM is a dictionary of mathematical constraints used in the composition of literature. The Oulipo's foremost concern has been to devise formal constraints and compose a few examples of each for the express purpose of pointing to the potential these formalisms create. Oulipian constraints have been responsible for some of the most original works of literature ever produced. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Oulipo Laboratory: Texts from the Bibliotheque Oulipienne'
The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever.
The Oulipos original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers).
The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pierrot Mon Ami'
"Pierrot Mon Ami was perhaps Queneau's masterpiece . . . This unlikely guru exerted a major influence on a new avant-garde (notably on Georges Perec, who was devoted to him). But if there was a sage in Queneau he never imparted his wisdom more touchingly than in Pierrot Mon Ami."Times Literary Supplement
Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity.More editions of Pierrot Mon Ami:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Declarations of Dependence'
Like new; read once [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Singular Pleasures'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Species of Spaces and Other Pieces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stories & Remarks'
Raymond Queneaupolyglot, novelist, philosopher, poet, mathematician, screenwriter, and translatorwas one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work touches on many of the major literary movements of his lifetime, from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the application of constraint.

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sunday of Life'
When shop-owner Julia Segovia decides that she's going to marry the handsome if exceedingly young and naive soldier Valentin Bru, he willingly goes along with her scheme. Little does he know that he will have to contend with disgruntled in-laws, eccentric locals, a vulgar and cunning wife, a shifty career in fortune-telling, the approaching threat of war with Germany and the mysteries of Parisian public transport.
With a cast of eccentric characters, amusing incidents and an uplifting tone, The Sunday of Life its title playfully alluding to Hegel s theory of history is a scintillating novel which showcases Queneau s trademark punning, sly wit and delight in the absurdity of people and situations. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Things : A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep'
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 an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.
Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.
In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.
Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Three by Perec'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three By Perec: Which Moped With Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard? The Exeter Text Jewels, Secrets, Sex'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tlooth'
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Void'
As his country is torn apart by social and political anarchy, Anton Vowl, a chronic insomniac, disappears. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any indication, for any faint hint, as to his location. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'W or the Memory of a Childhood Georges Perec'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'W or the Memory of Childhood'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We Always Treat Women Too Well'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Witch Grass'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zazie in the Metro'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Zazie in the Metro'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cantatrix Sopranica L. Et Autres ecrits Scientifiques'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Comment J'ai ecrit Certains De Mes Livres'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Exercices De Style'
160pages. in12. broché. Le narrateur rencontre, dans un autobus, un jeune homme au long cou, coiffé d'un chapeau orné d'une tresse au lieu de ruban. Le jeune homme échange quelques mots assez vifs avec un autre voyageur, puis va s'asseoir à une place devenue libre. Un peu plus tard, le narrateur rencontre le même jeune homme en grande conversation avec un ami qui lui conseille de faire remonter le bouton supérieur de son pardessus. Cette brève histoire est racontée quatre-vingt-dix-neuf fois, de quatre-vingt-dix-neuf manières différentes. Mise en images, portée sur la scène des cabarets, elle a connu une fortune extraordinaire. Exercices de style est un des livres les plus populaires de Queneau. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Fleurs Bleues'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Vie Mode D'emploi: Romans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zazie Dans Le Metro De Raymond Queneau'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Cosmicomiche'
Softcover. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Se Una Notte D'Inverno UN Viaggiatore'
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