Since its inception in Paris in 1960, the OuLiPo—ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature—has continually expanded our sense of what writing can do. Discover more about this elite group of writers in a discussion with Oulipo member, American writer, and translator Daniel Levin Becker who will be in conversation with Deep Vellum founder and publisher Will Evans.
About the Book
All That is Evident is Suspect: the first collection in English to offer a life-size picture of the group in its historical and contemporary incarnations, and the first in any language to represent all of its members (numbering 41 as of April 2018 ). Combining fiction, poetry, essays and lectures, and never-published internal correspondence—along with the acrobatically constrained writing and complexly structured narratives that have become synonymous with oulipian practice.
INSIDE: Sharks as poets and vice versa, the Brisbane pitch drop experiment, novel classifications for real or imaginary libraries, the monumental sadness of difficult loves, the obsolescence of the novel, the symbolic significance of the cup-and-ball game, holiday closures across the Francophone world, what happens at Fahrenheit 452, Warren G. Harding’s dark night of the soul, Marcel Duchamp’s imperviousness to conventional spacetime laws, bilingual palindromes, cartoon eodermdromes, oscillating poems, métro poems, metric poems, literary madness, straw cultivation.
About the Author
Daniel Levin Becker is an American writer, translator and musical critic. In 2006, he finished his undergraduate studies in English and French at Yale University, where he also wrote for campus humor magazine Yale Record. In 2009 he was elected member of the French literary workshop Oulipo, making him the second American member of this group (the first is Harry Mathews). He was elected after a Fulbright year spent organizing and indexing that group's archives. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, published in April 2012 by Harvard University Press.
He is currently the reviews editor for the magazine The Believer.