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  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099541660
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep




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.

  • Published: 15 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099541660
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Georges Perec

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.

Also by Georges Perec

See all

Praise for Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep

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

[A Man Asleep is] grimly obsessing...one turns the pages with unlikely fascination

Euan Cameron, Sunday Telegraph

Perec's fiction is a delight to all who care for real literature

Guardian

Two striking, clumsy, romantic studies in extremism

Independent

[A Man Asleep] Bleak, benighted, uncompromisingly unhappy, this is not the book to read if you already have difficulty in finding reasons for getting out of bed

Guardian

Things, Perec's first novel, is an innovative, perceptive and even moving study of corrosive consumerism

Independent

A Man Asleep is true to its subject and also readable...a remarkable achievement

Independent
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