Arranging your bookshelves according to Georges Perec

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How to sort your books according to Georges Perec, literature’s organisation expert

Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books

'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order' 
 
One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world. 
 
One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

One of the most important post-war French novelists, Georges Perec was only 42 when he died in 1982. He is the author of LIFE, A USER'S MANUAL. THE WINTER JOURNEY has been published as a Penguin Syren.

One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep

Two brilliant, witty and subversive stories from the modern master - cult classics for the 60s generation

Required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of this modern master

As a witty attack on consumerism Things is as much a parable of the Nineties as it is a story of the Sixties

Perec's first novel is a masterpiece of elegaic mockery

Things, Perec's first novel, is an innovative, perceptive and even moving study of corrosive consumerism

[A Man Asleep is] grimly obsessing...one turns the pages with unlikely fascination

[A Man Asleep] Bleak, benighted, uncompromisingly unhappy, this is not the book to read if you already have difficulty in finding reasons for getting out of bed

A Man Asleep is true to its subject and also readable...a remarkable achievement

Perec's fiction is a delight to all who care for real literature

Two striking, clumsy, romantic studies in extremism

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.

Things: A Story of the Sixties is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation. 
 
In A Man Asleep, a young student embarks upon a disturbing and exhaustive pursuit of indifference, following his experience in non-existence with relentless logic.

W or The Memory of Childhood

A disturbing, ground-breaking book about Perec's wartime childhood, and about where truth and fiction overlap

Perec was a haunted writer, haunted by his Jewish ancestry, by the Holocaust that coincided with his own orphaned childhood, by the death of his father in 1940 and his mother's disappearance in Auschwitz. Writing, for him, was an act of exorcism

A strange and complicated book, a work of tremendous, silenced emotion

His brilliant and profound memoir-fantasy deserves to be recognised for what it is: a masterpiece

The childhood story of 'W' carries Perec's confused conception of the concentration camps...bewilderingly sad

Perec was a polymathic genius, and his early death in 1982 (he was only 45) robbed France of its most dazzling experimental writer, one who tried everything and failed at nothing...He has, deservedly, become a cult in France, particularly with young Parisians, who instinctively (and rightly) identify him as the super-zapper, the biographer of their fragmented consumer culture, of which he was himself the creation.

A remarkable book about Perec's own early life whose formality is quite hauntingly at odds with its terrible subject

Perec has a political edge and his books can shift your mental furniture. This is a fine example of a very brave idea that he made work quite brilliantly. as horrifying as Orwell but as ludicrous as Monty Python. What two bizarre flavours to mix into the same dish and not nauseate the reader! It's brilliant. It is a very influential book and it's always in the background of my writing. It's a very fine role model because it says you can make anything work as long as you navigate the pitfalls.

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.

Written in alternating chapters, W or the Memory of Childhood, tells two parallel tales, in two parts. One is a story created in childhood and about childhood. The other story is about two people called Gaspard Winckler: one an eight-year-old deaf-mute lost in a shipwreck, the other a man despatched to search for him, who discovers W, an island state based on the rules of sport. As the two tales move in and out of focus, the disturbing truth about the island of W reveals itself. 
 
Perec combines fiction and autobiography in unprecedented ways, allowing no easy escape from these stories, or from history.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Available for the first time in Black Classics

One of the most important post-war French novelists, Georges Perec was only 42 when he died in 1982. He is the author of LIFE, A USER'S MANUAL. THE WINTER JOURNEY has been published as a Penguin Syren. John Sturrock is an editor at the London Review of Books.

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

A User's Manual

Life

'The last major event in the history of the novel' Italo Calvino

A dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination

An eccentric, madly ambitious scheme to display life all at once. The product of a hectically ingenious intelligence, like James Joyce's

The finest novel to appear in French since Beckett's trilogy

Very funny and very sad... A treasure-chest of stories, something to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever responded to works on the same scale and in the same spirit as Rabelais and Chaucer and Sterne

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.

In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime...

A Void

'There is not a single E in this novel. That's right: no here, there, where, when; no yes, no love, no sex!' New York Times Book Review

A true tour de force: a full-length novel containing not a single 'E'. An entertaining post-modern detective story...dazzling... the translator's dazzling recreation conveys the author's near magical cleverness while preserving an underlying seriousness that makes this book much more than a curiosity

Adair's translation is an astounding Anglicisation of Francophonic mania, a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana, of humour, pathos and loss

Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl's past starts to cast its malignant shadow. This virtuoso story, chock-full of plots and subplots, shows the skill of both author and translator who impart all the action without a crucial grammatical prop: the letter 'e'.

Georges Perec

David Bellos

Georges Perec’s cool, exacting portrait of a couple torn apart by consumer desire 
 
A young couple build their lives around the objects they long to own. From furniture to clothes to carefully imagined interiors, their desires shape their sense of who they are – and who they might become. Yet satisfaction always seems just out of reach.. Precise and quietly ironic, Things explores the promises of material life – and the emptiness that can follow. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Georges Perec

Books by Georges Perec

Articles featuring Georges Perec

How to sort your books according to Georges Perec, literature’s organisation expert

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