Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep

Required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of this modern master – Andrew Motion * Observer *
As a witty attack on consumerism Things is as much a parable of the Nineties as it is a story of the Sixties * Sunday Times *
Perec’s first novel is a masterpiece of elegaic mockery * Financial Times *
Things, Perec’s first novel, is an innovative, perceptive and even moving study of corrosive consumerism * Independent *
[A Man Asleep is] grimly obsessing…one turns the pages with unlikely fascination – Euan Cameron * Sunday Telegraph *
[A Man Asleep] Bleak, benighted, uncompromisingly unhappy, this is not the book to read if you already have difficulty in finding reasons for getting out of bed * Guardian *
A Man Asleep is true to its subject and also readable…a remarkable achievement * Independent *
Perec’s fiction is a delight to all who care for real literature * Guardian *
Two striking, clumsy, romantic studies in extremism * Independent *

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties. He went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. His work includes 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 novels.

Life: A User’s Manual, which draws on many of Perec’s other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making. It was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce’s Ulysses, won the Prix Medicis, and established Perec’s international reputation.

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