Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep

Description

Two brilliant, witty and subversive stories from the modern master - cult classics for the 60s generation Things- A Story of the Sixties 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'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation. 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.

Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things- A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed 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, of course, novels. Life- A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec's international reputation.

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 *