The renowned French author's modern masterpiece: "one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov" ( Boston Globe).Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec's "elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel" begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, movin...

The posthumously published first novel from the acclaimed French author of Life: A User's Manual offers "glimpses of Perec's future greatness" ( The New Yorker).Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazz...

“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”—Italo Calvino“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”—Steven Poole, GuardianThe Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertain...

A moving hybrid work about Ellis Island and immigration by the marvelous Georges PerecGeorges 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 ...

Perec's poignant essays on European cultural production, translated in English for the first time.In these writings, Georges Perec constructs a bold new critical discourse—one that remains faithful to leftist imperatives such as history, class consciousness, and revolution—while maintaining his independence from the dominant voices of the Left, whose vision had long dominated the Left’s understanding of literature and politics in postwar France.Perec's essa...