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This article reviews Michel Thaler's "The Train From Nowhere" (in French and held by the Sackner Archive). This book does not have any verbs following in the tradition of Pindar ("Ode Minus Sigma"), Lope Carpio ( five novels without vowels). Gottlob Burmann (130 poems without r's), George Perec ("La Disparition," "Les Revantes"), Charles Vincent Wright ("Gadsby"). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents First published in French as "La Disparition," this novel is written without the using the letter "e" in any of the words. The Sackner Archive holds the French edition which is written the same way. Books written by Adair, a British writer, and published by Writers Forum, are also held by the Sackner Archive. The following is a review of this book from Case Western Reserve University English Department in 1997 that was copied from their Internet site in 1999. Anton Vowl is missing. Slain or just put away, nobody knows, but a similar void now looms for his pals as that group frantically hunts A Void's lost protagonist. Anton is missing also a singular ABC, which graphic mark ought to form part of a sound Vowl and a common "Vowl" sound. Arranging for many such omissions in this book is our lurking author, a lipogrammatic artist and assassin who both plots Vowl's doom and plucks his customary signatorial pictograph. The author is the late Georges Perec, who in 1969 took up the...

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This is a front page review of "Le Train de Nulle Part" (The Train to Nowhere) by Michel Thaler, the non de plume of Michel Dansel. The novel is written without any verbs - heavy on exclamation points and dashes. It is of the same genre as George Perec's work without any e's. The review itself is written without verbs. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Amazon.com: "One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Includes the English version of Perec's famous pseudo-scientific spoof, "Experimental demonstration of the tomatotrophic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)." Other pseudo-scientific writings, one in collaboration with Harry Mathews, appear in their French versions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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It should be noted that Ernest Vincent Wright in the novel "Gadsby" also wrote a novel without the letter 'e' in 1939. This copy is a reprint of the original novel first printed in 1969. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This is a second printing of the first edition of the novel, "Life: A User's Manual," as translated into English by David Bellos, a version also held by the Sackner Archive. The novel was the winner of the Medicis Prize (1978). It was printed on November 27, 1978 whereas the first printing took place August 25, 1978. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Originally published in French in 1978, this novel is considered to be an outstanding example of twentieth century fiction in the tradition of Canterbury Tales and Ulysses. It is composed of a seies of stories that occur at the same time in an apartment building in the 17th arrondisement of Paris. Fictional but meaningful, the people and events are described in humorous and specific detail. The book is constructed like a puzzle and contains an index and a chronology.WikipedIa: Life A User's Manual (the original title is La Vie mode d'emploi) is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, though Perec himself preferred to avoid labels and his only long term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle.La...

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This is a review of "A Void" by George Perec, translated from the French by Gilbert Adair. Perec has witten the novel as a lipogram without using the letter E throughout the work. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This book is edited with an introduction and translated by John Sturrock. The initial story is about "domestic and urban space and how, these days, we are made to occupy it. This is pure topography: plain to the point of obviousness at times, yet forever veering off into jolly idiosyncrasies of the kind that make Perec so entertainig to read." For example in "Species of Spaces," Perec describes the page, the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment buildlng, the street, the neighborhood, the town, the countryside, Europe, the world and space.Alessandro M Angelini (New York, NY) - Reviewing this book for Amazon.com writes "As the author of the world's longest palindrome and other literary feats, Perec's phenomenal linguistic skills and imagination remain incomparable. His works, however, on not merely experiments within the constraints of language; I am not as impressed with his ability to write a 300-page novel without a single letter "e" as much as his endearing sense of...

Scope and Contents Internet Peter Baker's translation of introduction: During the last week of August 1939, while rumors of war invaded Paris, a young literature professor, Vincent Degrael, was invited to spend several days at a property in the neighborhood of le Havre that belonged to the parents of one of his colleagues, Denis Borrade. The eve of his departure, while he was exploring the library of his hosts searching for one of the books that one has always promised oneself to read, but which one generally only has time to flip through the pages negligently next to the fire before going to make up the fourth at bridge, Degrael fell upon a slim volume entitled The Winter Voyage, whose author, Hugo Vernier, was absolutely unknown to him, but the first pages of which made such a strong impression on him that he barely took the time to excuse himself from his friend and his hosts before going to read it in his room. The Winter Voyage was a sort of first-person narrative, situated in a...

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The book consists of two novels. Things deals with a young French lower middle class couple in the post-WWII era who are marketing researchers. They want to be acquire possessions but do not have the necessary job skills or work ethnic to become wealthy. A Man Asleep is an existensionlist story about a nameless person that is written entirely in the second voice. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Three short stories were published in one volume as suggested by Georg Perec to his publisher shortly before his death in in 1982 at the age of 46. The stories are titled, "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex," "Which Moped with Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard ?" and "A Gallery Portrait." The Exeter Text is the opposite of the lipogram, "A Void" in that it is written using only the vowel 'e.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This book was originally published in 1976 in an edition of 100 copies. Perec presented this book that consisted of word play writings to his friends as a New Year's gift. A facsimile signature and inscription is printed on back cover. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This novel contains two distinct alternating biographies: the first is an allegorical story of W, a bizarre, mythical island civilization, symbolizing the Holocaust. It is printed in italics. The second text is Perec's memories of his childhood in Paris. Perec writes in his introduction that the two stories "are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though neither could exist on its own, as though it was only their coming together, the distant light they cast on each other, that could make apparent what is never quite said in one,never quite said in the other, but said only in their fragile overlapping." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.