"Sublime additions to Raymond Queneau's sublime novels, Stories and Remarks are dryly comic, beautifully made, and despite their gorgeous absurdities, as unassuming as a cup of coffee. A book of pleasures and surprises."--Gilbert Sorrentino. "This absorbing collection definitively confirms the ingenuity, inventiveness, and variety of Raymond Queneau's genius. It will delight and surprise those already familiar with his novels and beguile the newcomer with its multitude of approaches to the work of a great and utterly original author."--Harry Mathews _ "This is a translation of a collection of Raymond Queneau's short prose pieces, originally called, with deliberate casualness, Contes et propos. To translate Queneau at all is a bold undertaking ... but Lowenthal is sufficiently inventive with his English to convey the spirit of the French most of the time... [and] provides an informative introduction with a nod to each of Queneau's enthusiasms."--Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 2001
Raymond Queneau—polyglot, novelist, philosopher, poet, mathematician, screenwriter, and translator—was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work touches on many of the major literary movements of his lifetime, from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the application of constraint.