Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.
Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
Life: A User's Manual is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, but Perec preferred to avoid labels and his only long-term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.
Marie-José Pérec is a retired French track and field sprinter who specialised in the 200 and 400 metres and is a three-time Olympic gold medalist.
Kaspar Hauser was a German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. Hauser's claims, and his subsequent death by stabbing, sparked much debate and controversy. Theories propounded at the time linked him with the grand ducal House of Baden and proposed his birth had been hidden as part of royal intrigue. These opinions in many ways have been documented by later investigation. Many during and after Hauser's life have also argued that he was most likely a fraud.
A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition, is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic, and journalist. He was critically most famous for the "fiendish" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used, but was more widely known for the films adapted from his novels, including Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003).
David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States. He was director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication from its inception in 2007 until July 1, 2019.
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, is a short book by Georges Perec written in October 1974 and published in 1975. It is a collection of observations which Perec wrote as he sat in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris. Rather than describing impressive or notable things such as the architecture, Perec aims to describe all the things that usually pass unnoticed. He charts brief details of buses and people who pass, not worrying about repetition.
W, or the Memory of Childhood, is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction by Georges Perec, published in 1975. Perec's novel consists of alternating chapters of autobiography and of a fictional story, divided into two parts. The autobiographical thread is a collection of uncertain memories, as well as descriptions of photos which preserve moments from Perec's childhood. The memories in the first part of the book lead up to Perec's separation from his mother when he was evacuated in the Second World War. The second part recollects his life as an evacuee. The adult narrator sometimes provides interpretations of the childhood memories, and often comments on details of the memories which his research showed to be false or borrowed.
The Scott Moncrieff Prize, named after the translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, is an annual £2,000 literary prize for French to English translation, awarded to one or more translators every year for a full-length work deemed by the Translators Association to have "literary merit". Only translations first published in the United Kingdom are considered for the accolade.
Ian Monk is a British writer and translator, based in Paris, France.
Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard? is a comic novella by Georges Perec. Perec's second published work, it was originally published in 1966 in French as Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? The English translation by Ian Monk was published in Three by Perec by David R. Godine, Publisher in 2004. The Review of Contemporary Fiction called Monk's translation "gorgeous and eloquent".
Things is a 1965 novel by Georges Perec, his first.
David R. Godine, Publisher is an American book publishing company, founded in 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts.
A Man Asleep is a 1967 novel by the French writer Georges Perec. It uses a second-person narrative, and follows a 25-year-old student, who one day decides to be indifferent about the world. A Man Asleep was adapted into a 1974 film, The Man Who Sleeps.
Vincent Bouchot is a French composer and musicologist. For many years, he sang as baritone with the Ensemble Clément Janequin.
Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope is the first documentary film directed by Robert Bober, filmed in New York in 1979 and broadcast by the French television channel TF1 on November 25 and 26, 1980. The script was written by the French writer Georges Perec, who also provided the commentary of the first part of the film and conducted the interviews in the second part.
