From the middle 1960s until his death in 1982, Georges Perec produced a score of major texts which, in their richness and their diversity, stand as one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary French literature. The salient constant in this corpus is change itself, particularly formal change: Perec wrote novellas, novels, poetry, plays, radio plays, essays, filmscripts, libretti, as well as other texts which resist traditional generic taxonomy. "Mon ambition d'écrivain," said Perec in 1978, "serait de parcourir toute la littérature de mon temps sans jamais avoir le sentiment de revenir sur mes pas ou de remarcher dans mes propres traces, et d'écrire tout ce qu'il est possible à un homme d'aujourd'hui d'écrire" (My ambition as a writer would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to...