Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology celebrating Perec, Calvino and many others
The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in Paris in 1960 by the writer and publisher Raymond Queneau and the scientist and educator François Le Lionnais. Oulipo set out to formally explore the use of mathematical and other rules – known as “constraints” – in the writing of literature.
Its approach was two-pronged. First, what Oulipo called “anoulipism”, discovering constraints used by writers from other ages and cultures, wittily referred to as “plagiarism by anticipation”: they seized on reversible poems in 3rd-century China and acrostics concealed in the Psalms, as well the bifurcating narratives in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 “The Garden of Forking Paths”. Second, “synthoulipism”, the invention and demonstration of new constraints for any writer who wished to use them.
In the 'prisoner’s constraint', letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y) can't be used
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