"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.” –Ian Klaus, CityLab
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Literary Hub
Susan Harlan
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is about the kinds of ordinary occurrences that make up the experience of sitting in a café. Much of the book reads like a list. It is a kind of inventory: an attempt to catalogue, to exhaust, a place.
CityLab
Ian Klaus
Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.
The New York Times: Magazine
Anna Kodé
We’re shoulder to shoulder with many universes; countless lives, hopes, dreams and fears as complicated as our own, all clustered in the same crowded shops, train cars and sidewalks. Why ignore all that?
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Launched in 2009, Wakefield Press is an independent American publisher devoted to the translation of overlooked gems and literary oddities in small, affordable and elegant paperback editions. Its publications include the Wakefield Handbooks series--which the press defines as "the guidebook as imagined through literature"--and the Imagining Science series ("science as imagined through literature"), as well as forays into classic experimental fiction. continue to blog
It goes without saying that we are living through an unprecedented, open-ended time of confusion, fear, pressure and information overload. All that we have loved (and hated) and every small, hard-to-quantify detail that has given our days structure up until now has been upended. And yet… we still have books! For us book people, reading is structure. So we've asked one of our resident experts, Natasha Gilmore, for her Staff Pick Reading Books for this period of voluntary (or involuntary) quarantine. Be inspired… and enjoy!
"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.” –Ian Klaus, CityLab
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
