Raymond Queneau

Only a pataphysician nurtured lovingly on surrealist excess could have come up with The Blue Flowers, Queneau's 1964 novel. At his death in 1976, Raymond Queneau was one of France's most eminent men of letters––novelist, poet, essayist, editor, scientist, mathematician, and, more to the point, pataphysician. And only …

Exercises in Style, written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus, witnesses an altercation between a man with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the …

Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with Gabriel, her female-impersonator uncle. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic …