Scope and Contents From Publishers Weekly review. "Novelist R"šmond Namredef, the narrator of this endlessly inventive and unorthodox fiction, is on his way back to France after having lived in the United States for 10 years. R"šmond is not returning in the role of the rich American, although he claims to have a wealthy American girlfriend, Susan. In the U.S., it seems, he supported himself through a series of odd jobs, among them one as a jazz musician. These autobiographical details are imparted by R"šmond to a "professional listener" in a number of cafes in Paris. Federman has adopted Raymond Roussel's trick of telling a story for the sake of its digressions. The digressions here include R"šmond's childhood, his life in hiding from the Nazis during the occupation, his multitudinously scheming extended family and his Aunt Rachel's legendary existence. Aunt Rachel escaped from the orphanage in which R"šmond's mother, Marguerite, was also kept and proceeded to enjoy a mysterious international career....

Scope and Contents This novel is printed as a facsimile of the typewritten manuscript with its experimental layouts. From the Publisher: "Double or Nothing" is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of...

Scope and Contents This novel is printed as a facsimile of the typewritten manuscript with its experimental layouts. From the Publisher: "Double or Nothing" is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of...