Jacques Roubaud - Böcker

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud’s delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months?The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara—to name only a few. (Even the Sun has a speaking role.) There are dramatic abductions, daring rescues, passages in hitherto untranscribed languages (Dog, Grasshopper, Duck), tales of unrequited love, allegorical interludes, poems, a playlet, and much more. (But no suspenders, the author promises.)Finally, there are 79 questions for readers of the novel, to see how closely they’ve been paying attention—for ultimately The Princess Hoppy is a giddy inquiry into how we read literary works. It is both an old-fashioned tale and an ultramodern hypertext, the oldest and the latest thing in fiction.

Written in the years following the sudden death of Roubaud's wife, Some Thing Black is a profound and moving transcription of loss, mourning, grief, and the attempts to face honestly and live with the consequences of death, the ever-present not-there-ness of the person who was/is loved.

-- First paperback edition.-- Hortense is in trouble again. Set to marry the Premier Prince Presumptive, our heroine finds herself caught in the middle of the plot of Hamlet, playing the unfortunate role of Ophelia. Can she escape in time? Brimming with brilliant wordplay, mathematical equations, literary allusions, and cats, Hortense in Exile continues the Hortense series in grand style.-- Jacques Roubaud is president of the l'Association Georges Perec, a society dedicated to honoring the work of his fellow Oulipian.-- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1992).

-- First paperback edition.-- In this madcap metafictional mystery a 22-year-old philosophy student (Hortense) is kidnapped and a dog is murdered -- the imaginary country of Poldevia is somehow involved. Arranged in the form of a sestina (replete with authorial asides and plenty of puns, jokes and wordplay), this is the second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed Hortense series.-- A professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a long time member of Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, Jacques Roubaud is the author of several novels and works of poetry.-- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1989).

Composed of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and partly a response to the poetry of Raymond Queneau, this collection explores Jacques Roubaud’s many poetic modes. He skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry without abandoning the melancholy playfulness that has defined his lengthy writing career.A selection of Roubaud’s best recent work, The Form of a City describes not only Paris, but also its people, its writers (and those of the Oulipo in particular), its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.

Part novel, part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of our time. Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives meaning to every page. Having failed to write his intended novel (The Great Fire of London), instead Roubaud creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process. This novel stands as a lyrical counterpart of the great postmodern masterpieces by fellow Oulipians Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. First published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1991, now available again.

Kalniete's book is a moving and eloquent testimony to her family and to the Latvian nation--to their shared fate during more than fifty years of occupation. It is an indictment of the inhuman repression of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Above all, it is the story of human survival, and it has become the most-translated Latvian book in recent history.

Longtime Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud's homage to one of the great passions of his life: mathematics...

An introduction to the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go by Oulipo members Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques RoubaudWritten by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics.As in the Oulipian strategy of writing under constraint, the role of structured gameplay (within literature and without) proves to be of primordial importance: a means of moving outside an inherent system, of instigating new figures of style and meaning, new paths toward collaboration and new strategies for filling a space: be it the space of a terrain, a blank page, a white screen or a freshly stretched canvas.Translated for the first time, this treatise outlines the history of Go, the rules for playing it, some central tactics and strategies for playing it and overcoming the threats posed by an opponent, general information and trivia, and a glossary that ranges from Atari (check) to Yose (the end of a match).Pierre Lusson (born 1950) is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France.Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.”Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of mathematics at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart and The Loop.