Authors: Georges Perec, John Sturrock (Editor), John Sturrock (Translator), John Sturrock
ISBN-13: 9780141442242, ISBN-10: 0141442247
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: December 2025
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Georges Perec, author of the highly acclaimed Life: A User's Manual, was only forty-six when he died in 1982. Despite a tragic childhood, during which his mother was deported to Auschwitz, Perec produced some of the most entertaining essays of the age. His literary output was deliberately varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work, the first to appear in English, demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility. As he contemplates the many ways in which we occupy the space around us, as he depicts the commonplace items with which we are familiar in a startling, engrossing way, as he recounts his psychoanalysis while remaining reticent about his feelings or depicts the Paris of his childhood without a trace of sentimentality, we become aware that we are in the presence of a remarkable, virtuoso writer.
Introduction | ||
Species of Spaces / Especes d'espaces | 1 | |
Foreword | 5 | |
The Page | 9 | |
The Bed | 16 | |
The Bedroom | 20 | |
The Apartment | 26 | |
The Apartment Building | 40 | |
The Street | 46 | |
The Neighbourhood | 57 | |
The Town | 60 | |
The Country | 68 | |
Countries | 73 | |
Europe | 76 | |
Old Continent | 76 | |
New Continent | 76 | |
The World | 77 | |
Space | 80 | |
from Je suis ne | 93 | |
I Was Born | 95 | |
The Scene of a Flight | 99 | |
The Parachute Jump | 109 | |
The Gnocchi of Autumn | 115 | |
Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die | 120 | |
The Work of Memory | 123 | |
Ellis Island: Description of a Project | 130 | |
from Penser/Classer | 135 | |
Notes on What I'm Looking For | 137 | |
Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table | 140 | |
Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books | 144 | |
Twelve Sidelong Glances | 152 | |
The Scene of a Stratagem | 161 | |
Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline | 170 | |
On the Difficulty of Imagining an Ideal City | 182 | |
'Think/Classify' | 184 | |
from L'Infra-ordinaire | 203 | |
Approaches to What? | 205 | |
The Rue Vilin | 208 | |
Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour | 218 | |
The Holy of Holies | 236 | |
Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four | 240 | |
from L.G. | 247 | |
Robert Antelme or the Truth of Literature | 249 | |
from Cantatrix Sopranica L. | 263 | |
A Scientific and Literary Friendship | 265 | |
The Winter Journey / Le Voyage d'hiver | 273 | |
from Voeux | 283 | |
New Year's Greetings | 285 |