Oulipo Laboratory - Raymond Queneau and co.

Oulipo Laboratory (Atlas Anti-Classics 4), Italo Calvino, Paul Fournel, Jacques Jouet, Harry Mathews & Raymond Queneau / ISBN : 0947757899 / 174-page paperback from Atlas Press (UK, 1995) / Out-of-print, used book in very good condition (no marks inside, light shelfwear, age toning to page, overall tight and clean)

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Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Harry Mathews, Iain White, & Warren Motte Jr.

Texts from the Bibliothèque Oulipiènne, prefaced by two manifestos by François Le Lionnais. The Bibliothèque Oulipiènne is comprised of small fascicles published by the Oulipo (more than 200 to date), usually containing texts from a single member of the group. In this collection we translated six very various issues. Le Lionnais’s manifestos laid out some of the principles of the group; Queneau’s analysis went back to one of its earliest ideas, that of combining literature and mathematics (in this case the theses of David Hilbert’s); Calvino revealed the structures underlying his If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…; Fournel gave us a modern realist novel that omits the entire text of the work except its peripheral elements; Jouet restored to us the love poetry written in the Great Ape language from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs; Berge, a professional mathematician of some renown, applied his methods to the detective story; and finally Mathews offered two series of poems, including one consisting of limericks which appear to rhyme but do not.