{"title":"Georges Perec","description":"Georges Perec was a French essayist, novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker. Born in Paris in 1936, the child of Polish Jews, his father died as soldier in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Much of his work dealt with themes of identity, loss, absence--including his most celebrated work, Life A User's Manual. In addition to being honored by the Prix Renaudot (1965), the Prix Jean Vigo (1974), the Prix Médicis (1978), and the French postal service (2002), both an asteroid and a street in Paris were named in his honor--as well as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday. Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist--who took on the \"fiendish\" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel, A Void, in which the letter E is not used.","products":[{"product_id":"a-void-paperback","title":"A Void - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA mind-bending and mysterious comedy from the author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife A User's Manual\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Void\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is a great linguistic adventure and a metaphysical whodunit, chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all displaying Georges Perec's virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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 . . . \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003eA book that only Georges Perec could have conceived, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e called \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Void\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e, \"a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped.\"\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102513959135,"sku":"9781567928228","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/7poLWEa2qE9781567928228.webp?v=1781083401"},{"product_id":"life-a-users-manual-paperback","title":"Life a User's Manual - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov.\"--\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eStructured around a single moment in time -- 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 -- Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFrom the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife A User's Manual\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBut the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50103221944543,"sku":"9781567928280","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/C_haFtaLJM9781567928280.webp?v=1781090518"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/georges-perec.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}