A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology' The Guardian 'At times, you simply have to stand back in amazement' Daily Telegraph 'An exhilarating feat, it takes its place as the definitive anthology in English for decades to come' Marina Warner Brought together for the first time, here are 100 pieces of 'Oulipo' writing, celebrating the literary group who revelled in maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums. Featuring writers including Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, it includes poems, short stories, word games and even recipes. Alongside these famous Oulipians, are 'anticipatory' wordsmiths who crafted language with unusual constraints and literary tricks, from Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll. Philip Terry's playful selection will appeal to lovers of word games, puzzles and literary delights.

"...a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."--Time magazine A Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . .

Main description: What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau-and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature's quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for 0workshop for potential literature0) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec's novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker's love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman's delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic-and iconoclastic-group.

A late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic.

"No summary can do justice to the strange appeal of this unusual, short book, which is at once a crime novel, a comic novel and a serious political satire on contemporary Ukraine." —Anne Applebaum, The Wall Street Journal With the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly-free Ukraine is a shell-shocked land . . . In poverty-and-violence-wracked Kyiv, unemployed writer Viktor Zolotaryov leads a down-and-out life with his only friend, Misha, a penguin that he rescued when the local zoo started getting rid of animals it couldn't feed. Even more nerve-wracking for Victor: a local mobster has taken a shine to Misha and wants to borrow him for events. But Viktor thinks he’s finally caught a break when he lands a well-paying job at the Kyiv newspaper writing “living obituaries” of local dignitaries—articles to be filed for use when the time comes. The only thing is, the time always seems to come as soon as Viktor finishes writing the article. Slowly understanding that his own life may be in jeopardy, Viktor also realizes that the only thing that might be keeping him alive is his penguin.

The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), one of the most important groups of experimental writers of the late twentieth century, is still being felt in contemporary literature, criticism, and theory, both in Europe and the US. Founded in 1960 and still active today, this Parisian literary workshop has featured among its members such notable writers as Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau, all sharing in its light-hearted, slightly boozy bonhomie, the convivial antithesis of the fractious, volatile coteries of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. For the last fifty years the Oulipo has undertaken the same simple goal: to investigate the potential of 'constraints' in the production of literature--that is, formal procedures such as anagrams, acrostics, lipograms (texts which exclude a certain letter), and other strange and complex devices. Yet, far from being mere parlour games, these methods have been frequently used as part of a passionate--though sometimes satirical--involvement with the major intellectual currents of the mid-twentieth century. Structuralism, psychoanalysis, Surrealism, analytic philosophy: all come under discussion in the group's meetings, and all find their way in the group's exercises in ways that, while often ironic, are also highly informed. Using meeting minutes, correspondence, and other material from the Oulipo archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Oulipo and Modern Thought shows how the group have used constrained writing as means of puckish engagement with the debates of their peers, and how, as the broader intellectual landscape altered, so too would the group's conception of what constrained writing can achieve.

Queneau uses a variety of literary styles and forms in ninety-nine exercises which retell the same story about a minor brawl aboard a bus.