Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Wishes

Wishes

Perec, Georges
Cologne Wythe-Hall, Mara

Paperback

Literary Fiction

Publisher Price: $19.95

ISBN10: 1939663334
ISBN13: 9781939663337
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: Jul 24 2018
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Twelve years of Georges Perec's annual pamphlets filled with homophonic wordplay

In the beginning was the pun, Samuel Beckett once wrote. And so it was that Georges Perec brought the good word to his friends and acquaintances on a yearly basis, as an expression of his best wishes for the New Year. Wishes gathers together these ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, printed at his own expense in limited quantities. This paean to the pun consists of a series of short prose pieces, each concluding with a list of the everyday bits of language lying at their root. English proverbs, Latin phrases, the names of musicians, filmmakers, novelists and book titles are all fodder for Perec's homophonic translations: John Coltrane turns into an anecdote about a wanderer with a severe ring around the collar; Antonioni's first movie transforms into a prophecy of a murderous holiday; the phrase All's well that ends well becomes a pregnant cow named Alice hailed by a drunk Satan; and Maurice Ravel proves to be a warning against corpses with a predilection for root vegetables.

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