Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl's past starts to cast its malignant shadow.

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the -infraordinary-: the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday---what happens, - as he put it, -when nothing happens.- His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans...

Set in a Paris apartment block, this novel describes in minute detail the lives of the inhabitants and the apartments they inhabit at a specific moment in time.

'Things' is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. 'In A Man Asleep', a young student embarks upon a disturbing and exhaustive pursuit of indifference, following his experience in non-existence with relentless logic.

Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.

One of the most significant literary personalities in the world. Italo Calvino
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 humor, and accessibility.
As he...

Perec was a leading exponent of French literary surrealism who found humour - and pathos - in the human need for classification. Thoughts of Sorts is itself unclassifiable, a unique collection of philosophical riffs on his obsession with lists, puzzles, catalogues, and taxonomies. Introduced by Margaret Drabble.