Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young
What do Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino have in common? The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle. Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais founded their "Workshop for Potential Literature" in 1960 to find out how abstract restrictions could be c
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ( Nothing ), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud poet, novelist, mathematician com
Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) and A Void, was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty-eight, but left extensive drafts and
Devastated by the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but to continue living - writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in w
