Elementary MoralityPaperback, 1 June 2008

Elementary Morality, Raymond Queneau's last book, is in many ways his most momentous. Here he distils the work of a lifetime: as Surrealist, flâneur, mathematician, poet, student of Eastern philosophy, experimental novelist and co-founder of OuLiPo, the 'workshop for potential literature'. Its 131 texts in the form of quennets - an invented form - and prose poems generated by the hexagrams of the I Ching, are a remarkable meditation on landscape, death, war, Surrealism, and memory, at once playful, mysterious and illuminating. David Bellos contributes an authoritative introduction to this first complete English translation of the work.
Cover painting Sarah Raphael, Time Travel for Beginners (2000), copyright the Estate of Sarah Raphael 2007.