“... Scholar. It was 1956. Ashbery introduced him to the work of the eccentric procedural writer Raymond Roussel, which reignited Mathews’s literary imagination. In 1959 he came into some money and used it to found a little magazine named after one of Roussel’s works, Locus Solus: Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were collaborators. It ran for ...”

“... The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group’s initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets written by Queneau entitled Cent mille milliards de poèmes: these sonnets all use the same rhymes, and are grammatically constructed so that any line in any sonnet can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of the other nine sonnets ...”

“... even vainly – thick volume read with the ease of a novel. Again, the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of ...”

“... constraints. OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) was a literary association founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 and dedicated to the search for new forms of writing, mainly through the application of mathematical structures, gratuitous forms of word play, and bizarre constrictions on content. The Oulipian text aims for ...”

“... voiced on this count. While reading Twenty Months at Auschwitz by Pelagia Lewińska in 1945, Raymond Queneau noted that ‘the real meaning’ of the camps was to ‘dehumanise human beings (which was the goal proposed by Sade’s heroes)’, and found, in Sade, ‘a hallucinatory precursor of the world ruled by the Gestapo’. Later that same year ...”

“... his early forties, hadn’t been thought to be living up to his early promise. Sartre, Camus and Raymond Aron had praised his first book, a novel about Polish partisans, A European Education (1945), but he had later lost his audience, producing – among other things – an eccentric satire on racism and a Parisian rewrite of Oliver Twist. The initial ...”

“... Maud, but it remains a beginner’s effort. The Easy Life, however, reads like a novel by Duras. Raymond Queneau wrote in his reader’s report for Gallimard that although the novel was too influenced by Camus’s L’Étranger, he recommended publication, preferably after revisions. He also noted that he found the second section quite boring. It may ...”

“... reputation, bringing out new work by such established writers as Marcel Aymé, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Queneau and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as well as launching the careers of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot and Albert Camus. (He gave Camus a job that made it possible for him to live in Paris, and published L’Etranger in May 1942, followed by ...”

“... have found a lot to agree with. Another of Simenon’s unexpected intellectual affinities is with Raymond Queneau, who in the course of his studies spent a lot of time reflecting on the difference between spoken and written Greek, between the dialect of the street and the formal language. It occurred to Queneau that ...”

“... connected in cultural circles: his mother’s acquaintances included the actress Anna Karina and Raymond Queneau, who became Patrick’s maths tutor and later introduced him to Gaston Gallimard, his publisher. Neither Alberto nor Louisa appears to have had any interest in parenting, a task they farmed out to an eccentric group of women in the ...”

“... poem appeared in 1939 in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But ...”

“... as places (Ecuador, Asia, Brazil), and whose investigations and ethnographical esprit anticipate Raymond Queneau. Not ‘works’ in any finished sense, but a chain reaction of occasions, co-ordinates of a self both extrovert and hidden, dispersed by travel or by the many voices of mescaline.As for Queneau, a few of ...”

“... just about possible to see it as some kind of Oulipo jest avant la lettre, a hundred years before Raymond Queneau actually did it. But speaking as a freelancer myself, I detect a high note of low desperation.Baudelaire’s fragments frequently look less like serious literature and more like the delusive autofiction of a long-time drug addict: a ...”

“... to win prizes in the League of Nations essay competition two years in a row, beating the young Raymond Williams the second time around. From BMB Murdoch learned, too, an admiration for the Soviet Union which the evidence of Stalin’s purges and show trials could not shake; her Soviet sympathies outlasted her pacifism by some years.It was only in ...”

“... interests to the works of the rich, bizarre and innovative French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel. In Paris, Péret contacted Roussel’s business manager, hoping to arrange a meeting with the man whom Louis Aragon called ‘the President of the Republic of Dreams’. Members of the Surrealist group, including Péret, had consistently ...”