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Minor Canon

Perec tee

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Georges Perec (born George Peretz) (1936 – 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentarist, and essayist, and a prominent member of the Oulipo group. Perec's parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants to France; his father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of Perec's works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

Perec started writing reviews and essays for La Nouvelle Revue française and Les Lettres nouvelles, prominent literary publications, while studying history and sociology at the Sorbonne. In 1961, Perec began working at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory in the unit's research library as an archivist, a low-paid position which he retained until 1978. A few reviewers have noted that the daily handling of records and varied data may have had an influence on his literary style. Perec's other major influence was the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), which he joined in 1967, meeting Raymond Queneau, among others.

Many of Perec's novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Perec's first novel Les Choses (published in English as Things: A Story of the Sixties) (1965) was awarded the Prix Renaudot.

Perec's most famous novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life A User's Manual) was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as "novels," in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. La Vie mode d'emploi is a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints: the 99 chapters of the 600-page novel move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of the building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Perec is noted for his constrained writing. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994).

A heavy smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981 and died the following year at age 45.

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US

 

Size guide

  LENGTH WIDTH
XS (inches) 27 16 ½
S (inches) 28 18
M (inches) 29 20
L (inches) 30 22
XL (inches) 31 24
2XL (inches) 32 26
3XL (inches) 33 28
4XL (inches) 34 30
5XL (inches) 35 31

 

  LENGTH WIDTH
XS (cm) 68.6 42
S (cm) 71.1 45.7
M (cm) 73.7 50.8
L (cm) 76.2 55.9
XL (cm) 78.7 61
2XL (cm) 81.3 66
3XL (cm) 83.8 71.1
4XL (cm) 86.4 76.2
5XL (cm) 89 78.7