"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. "Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

The full story of one of France's greatest cinema legends, a clown whose film-making innovation was to turn everyday life into an art form. Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life. This biography charts Tati's rise and fall, from his earliest beginnings as a music hall mime during the Depression, to the success of Jour de Fête and Mon Oncle, to Playtime, the grandiose masterpiece that left the once celebrated director bankrupt and begging for equipment to complete his final films. Analysing Tati's singular vision, Bellos reveals the intricate staging of his most famous gags and draws upon hitherto inaccessible archives to produce a unique assessment of his work and its context for film lovers and film students alike.

The Interior Architecture Theory Reader presents a global compilation that collectively and specifically defines interior architecture. Diverse views and comparative resources for interior architecture students, educators, scholars, and practitioners are needed to develop a proper canon for this young discipline. As a theoretical survey of interior architecture, the book examines theory, history, and production to embrace a full range of interior identities in architecture, interior design, digital fabrication, and spatial installation. Authored by leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, fifty chapters refine and expand the discourse surrounding interior architecture.

French writing and French thought have always been held in a certain glamorous esteem. For young, radical philosophers of the 1960s searching out intellectual enlightenment in Left Bank cafes and bookshops, for serious-minded semiologists wishing to deconstruct everything around them, and for fans of the formal novel, France has remained a source of stimulation and fresh ideas. John Sturrock has written for many years about French literature and thought, and here presents a wonderfully accessible guide to the major figures of the last fifty years. Reviewing the various movements that have dominated the French intellectual scene—existentialism, the nouveua roman, structuralism, the OuLiPo—he illustrates how their proponents inspire and excite. How Jean-Paul Sartre, originally an author of little-known fiction, fused politics and philosophy to become one of the best known public intellectuals of the century; how Jacques Lacan's flamboyantly expressed ideas made him a hero to professors of literature while offending many of his fellow psychoanalysts; and how Boris Vian, who trained as an engineer, celebrated in his writing much of what was enjoyable to the French about America: jazz music, a mysterious criminal underworld, an irrevocable youthfulness. Written with great elegance and expertise, the essays in The Word from Paris make for an illuminating journey through the intellectual and cultural terrain of twentieth-century France.

Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder discusses the conditions of Phantom Limb Syndrome and Body Integrity Identity Disorder together for the first time, exploring examples from literature, film, and psychoanalysis to re-ground theories of the body in material experience. The book outlines the ways in which PLS and BIID involve a feeling of rupture underlined by a desire for wholeness, using the metaphor of the mirror-box (a therapeutic device that alleviates phantom limb pain) to examine how fiction is fundamentally linked to our physical and psychical realities. Using diverse examples from theoretical and fictional works, including thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, D.W. Winnicott, and Georges Perec, and films by Powell and Pressburger and Quentin Tarantino, each chapter offers a detailed exploration of the mind/body relationship and experiences of fragmentation, bodily ownership, and symbolic reconstitution. By tracing these concepts, the monograph demonstrates ways in which fiction can enable us to understand the psychosomatic conditions of PLS and BIID more thoroughly, while providing new ways of reading psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fictional works. The first book to analyse BIID in relation to PLS, Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder will be essential reading for academics and literary readers interested in the body, psychoanalysis, English literature, literary theory, film, and disability.

Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as 'lifeless' - impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group's early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of oulipians have brought the group's fascination with systems, games and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being 'lifeless', oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec's masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d'emploi for life.

Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work is its intrinsically geographical nature. With major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban and architectural concerns, both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, homes and apartments, and in a methodological way, experimenting with methods of urban exploration and observation, classification, enumeration and taxonomy.

Explores the crisis of modernity and the decisive assertion of technological modernism.

Refresh the Book discusses the changing perceptions, functions, forms, as well as literary and artistic potential of the book in the digital age.