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“... liberated him from the dread of ‘psychology’ – ‘Bye-bye New Yorker models!’ In 1970, Georges Perec, hoping to jog himself out of a creative slump, began to translate Mathews’s Tlooth; the two became friends, leading to Mathews’s involvement in the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle. Among the Oulipo were some of the most illustrious ...”

“... than the fate of its Jewish deportees, is what sets Modiano apart from his near contemporary Georges Perec, whose work was also haunted by the war. Born in 1936 into a family of Polish Jews living in Paris, Perec survived the Occupation in hiding, lost both his parents and built his work around the ...”

“... crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994).1 W, ou le souvenir ...”

“... must necessarily increase over time. (‘A library that is not arranged becomes disarranged,’ as Georges Perec put it. ‘This is the example I was given to try to get me to understand what entropy was and which I have several times verified experimentally.’) In Jackson’s phrase, ‘the most likely state of the world is chaos,’ a sentiment that ...”

“... and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel père ...”

“... he needs a button sewn on his coat. Exercices de style was extremely influential, not least on Georges Perec (who appears later in the anthology). But this anthology opts for a multiple-choice interactive text by Queneau, a sample of Oulipo-lite, arid and pleased with itself, whose title, ‘A Tale for Your Shaping’, invites the response: ‘No ...”

“... from an immutable set of personal traumas and fixations. However playful her methods, and whatever Perec-like constraints she imposed on herself, Acker’s unassuageable anger at her victimisation as a woman poured into her fractured narratives. Her first writings – quirky, stream-of-consciousness, deceptively confessional – are whimsically strewn with ...”

“... its diminishing arc, the details of your life inside recede. ‘On one side, me and my place,’ Georges Perec wrote: The private, the domestic (a space overfilled with my possessions: my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books, my odd copies of the Nouvelle Revue française); on the other side, other people, the world, the ...”

“... never existed – is immaterial. What is for me the most memorable novel of the last fifty years, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, is endlessly valuable because of its infinite promise: Perec invented a Parisian apartment block and bisected it, as if it were a doll’s house, to describe lives that might have ...”