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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.

Scope and Contents The review of this book by Jori Finkel in Art in America February 2008 follows below. If Andre Breton was the pope of Surrealism, then Francis Picabia was surely the playboy of Dada. It's not merely that he was born into the European elite, it's that he used his good fortune for such purposes as avoiding the front lines of World War I, maintaining and recuperating from his opium addiction, traveling extensively and living extravagantly. It's not just over the years he had three wives (two legal and one common-law), it's also that he had the bit of beginning one relationship before ending other, while enjoying dalliances on the side. At one point, while living in the South of France, he found his life so complicated that he had to his install new lover, his children's Swiss nanny, on his yacht in the harbor of Cannes, while his second wife remained at home.Something along the same lines could be said his art as well: the man got around. Some critics have compared Picabia to Picasso...

Scope and Contents Raymond Queneau - polyglot, novelist, poet, mathematician, screenwriter and translator - was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work touches on many of the major literary movements of his lifetime, from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the application of constraint. Michael Leiris contributed a preface.This book was reviewed by mjespuiva from Seattle, WA. This person states the following. "These pieces are followed by Notes - a section I rarely like in literature but here it is appropriate, necessary and well done. These pieces often require knowledge of the world play in French or the ability to catch allusions that are unlikely to be known by an English-language reader. A sampling of the texts included:"Dino" is the story of an invisible dog accompanying its master...