From the back cover: "George Perec (1936-1982) became the most celebrated French author of his generation, his novel 'Life A User's Manual" winning the Prix Medicis in 1978. From the start he was fascinated by the possibility of employing non-fictional languages for altogether more mischievous purposes and this book ccollects together various texts in which he uses the expressionless terminology of sociology, entomology and linguistics to achieve effects they are distinctly designed to avoid. Perec was an illustrious member of the Oulipo, a group of writers which is still very much active, and who explore the possibilities of artifiical systems in literature...Not surprisingly, the present book is "experimental", but it is also strange, preposterous, and wrily intertaining." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.