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Oulipo: Explore the Creative Potential of Constraints in Writing |
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Multiple choice
by Alejandro Zambra
Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny,poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.
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Cigarettes
by Harry Mathews
"Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel-and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness."
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Let me tell you ; : and Let me go on
by Paul Griffiths
"So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know." Ophelia's story is told in her own words in Let Me Tell You and Let Me Go On, two starkly evocative novels by writer and music critic Paul Griffiths. Not only is Ophelia brought out of the wings of Hamlet to reclaim her narrative, but her vocabulary is also literally made up of the words-a scant 481 in total-assigned to her by Shakespeare. Melodic and incantatory, Ophelia's voice attains remarkable directness and passion under such Oulipan constraint. Set before the events of the play, Let Me Tell You follows Ophelia as she contemplates her love for her father Polonius, her anger towards her absent mother, her perplexity at the prince, and her growing desperation to escape the fate that awaits her. Let Me Go On, on the other hand, is set after the play: Ophelia finds herself wandering the afterlife, where she encounters a phantasmagorical cast of Shakespearean players, all in search of their author, from her brother Laertes to Juliet's nurse to Mistress Quickly. At once an audaciously empathetic reimagination and an ambitious formal experiment, Let Me Tell You and Let Me Go On are sure to create haunting new resonances for readers of Shakespeare old and new alike.
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One hundred twenty-one days
by Micháele Audin
"This debut novel by renowned mathematician Micháele Audinonly the second book ever published in English by a female member of the prestigious and influential Oulipofollows the lives of French mathematicians through the World Wars. Oscillating stylistically from chapter to chapterat times a novel, fable, historical research, diaryOne Hundred Twenty-One Days locks and unlocks historical codes as it unravels the tragic entanglement of politics and science, culminating in a wholly original and emotionally powerful reading experience."--Page [4] of cover
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The fact of memory : 114 ruminations and fabrications
by Aaron Angello
"A child keeps a pet cloud in a dresser drawer. A man has coffee with his doppelganger. A 20-something stunt double performs pirate swordplay at birthday parties. A schoolkid ponders the absurdity of Hell. A woman sings a Diana Ross song to a stranger across a subway platform. In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud. The Fact of Memory uses its innovative structure to pause and consider how language-and people-can both enthrall and abandonus, how the invincibility of youthful ambition gives way to the nuanced disappointments of aging, how unanswerable philosophical questions can share the page with glimpses of our former selves navigating a fragmented past."
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Alphabetical Africa.
by Walter Abish
Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.
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Sleeping with the dictionary
by Harryette Romell Mullen
Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."
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The Anarchist Who Shared My Name
by Pablo Martín Sánchez
When Pablo Martín Sánchez discovers that he shares his name with a Spanish anarchist who was executed in 1924 for the attempted overthrow of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, he sets out to reconstruct his life story. Through references to key events in Europe’s history, including the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Verdun, and the influence of intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno and Victor Blasco Ibañez, The Anarchist Who Shared My Name elegantly captures the life of a man who sought to resist political injustice and paid the ultimate price for his protest. Martín Sánchez’s thrilling tale is the unsettling chronicle of a dark chapter in Spanish history, as courageous as it is timely.
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Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
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All That Is Evident Is Suspect : Readings from the Oulipo: 1963-2018
by Ian Monk
Since its inception in Paris in 1960, the OuLiPo―ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature―has continually expanded our sense of what writing can do. It’s produced, among many other marvels, a detective novel without the letter e (and a sequel of sorts without a, i, o, u, or y); an epic poem structured by the Parisian métro system; a story in the form of a tarot reading; a poetry book in the form of a game of go; and a suite of sonnets that would take almost 200 million years to read completely.
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A short treatise inviting the reader to discover the subtle art of Go
by Pierre Lusson
Written by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics.
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Empty Spaces
by Jordan Abel
Jordan Abel's new work grows out of the groundbreaking visual expression in his recently published NISHGA, a book that combined nonfiction with photography, concrete poetry, and literary inquiry. Whereas NISHGA integrated descriptions of the landscape from James Fenimore Cooper's settler classic The Last of the Mohicans into visual pieces, Empty Spaces reinscribes those words on the page itself, and in doing so subjects them to bold rewritings. Reimagining the nineteenth-century text from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge and spiritual traditions was severed by colonial violence, Abel attempts to answer his research question of what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, Abel creates an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing. Rather than turning to characters and dialogue to explore truth, Abel invites us to instead understand that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as the world lurches toward uncertainty
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Sphinx
by Anne Garrâeta
A genderless love story delves into the relationship between a nameless narrator and an American dancer.
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Life: a user's manual
by Georges Perec
Represents an exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality as seen through the eyes of the dying Serge Valene, an inhabitant of a large Parisian apartment block.
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The White Book
by Han Kang
In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
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Alphabetical diaries
by Sheila Heti
The award-winning author of the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? presents a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period arranged in sentences from A to Z. 50,000 first printing.
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The nature book
by Tom Comitta
"What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a "literary supercut" that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction's traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns-honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us."
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Exercises in style
by Raymond Queneau
On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew a new button on his overcoat.
Exercises in Style -- Queneau's experimental masterpiece and a hallmark book of the Oulipo literary group -- retells this unexceptional tale ninety-nine times, employing the sonnet and the alexandrine, onomatopoeia and Cockney. An "Abusive" chapter heartily deplores the events; "Opera English" lends them grandeur. Queneau once said that of all his books, this was the one he most wished to see translated. He offered Barbara Wright his "heartiest congratulations," adding: "I have always thought that nothing is untranslatable.Here is new proof."
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book’s central character.
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The imagined land
by Eduardo Berti
With sensuous imagery and musical cadence, Berti conjures up a star-crossed love story for a brother and sister in pre-revolutionary China. Their hearts' desires collide with their parents' strictness, superstitions, the delicate balance between modernity and tradition, and with the indelible memory of their grandmother, who visits the young girl in her dreams from the "imagined country" of her death.
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