General Line

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Médicis and established Perec's international reputation.Rob Halpern is Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University. He coordinates The Writers' Bloc, a poetry writing workshop inside Huron Valley Women's Prison. His books include Music for Porn (Nightboat 2012) and Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World (Kenning Editions 2021).

Praise for Things: Required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of this modern master

• Beyond the Terms of Engagement: Georges Perec's Critique of the Cultural Field, circa 1960; Or, The General Line in ContextIntroduction by Rob Halpern Essays from L.G.: A 1960s AffairThe "New Novel" and the Refusal of the RealFor a Realist LiteratureEngagement or Crisis of LanguageRobert Antelme, or the Truth of LiteratureThe Universe of Science FictionThe Perpetual Recovery (Hiroshima mon amour)Wozzeck, or The Apocalyptic Method*All of the above essays follow the text in L.G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992).Fugitive TextsDefense of Paul Klee The Robbe-Grillet MysteryThe 6th Congress of the Communist Student Union: Discussions and PerspectivesThe Thing (Free Jazz)Powers and Limits of the Contemporary French Novelist