Blake Butler
Blake Butler is the author of Sky Saw (New York Tyrant, 2012), Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial, 2011), and There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011). He is also the founder of the literary blog HTMLGIANT.
Exercises in Style: 65th Anniversary Edition
Fiction by Raymond Queneau
Translated from the French by Barbara Wright Chris Clarke
With a contribution by Ben Marcus Blake Butler Amelia Gray Jesse Ball Harry Mathews Lynne Tillman Shane Jones Jonathan Lethem Enrique Vila-Matas Frederic Tuten
On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew a new button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style, Queneu’s experimental masterpiece and a hallmark book of the OULIPO literary group, retells this unexceptional tale in ninety-nine exceptional ways, employing writing styles such as the sonnet and the alexandrine, onomatopoeia and even Cockney.…
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