Georges Perec was a French essayist, novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker. Born in Paris in 1936, the child of Polish Jews, his father died as soldier in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Much of his work dealt with themes of identity, loss, absence--including his most celebrated work, Life A User's Manual.

In addition to being honored by the Prix Renaudot (1965), the Prix Jean Vigo (1974), the Prix Médicis (1978), and the French postal service (2002), both an asteroid and a street in Paris were named in his honor--as well as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday.

Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist--who took on the "fiendish" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel, A Void, in which the letter E is not used.

"A Void is a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped. It's a novel about voids, accidental and murderous, about body snatching and snatching 40 winks, about abduction and seduction. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a detective novel or at least a whodunit, with this twist: E done it, but we mustn't ever say that. We can't. When the characters get close to E, they get written out of the plot (maimed, shredded, fed to carp)....I think anybody who gives this a try will roar along with it."
--New York Times

"...A verbal circus with sideshows featuring ancient languages, varying ways of communication, and prankster existentialism, all of which are of head-shaking genius. A mind-blowing feat of writing and translation."
--Kirkus

"Perec sets out his game as a mock mystery; or perhaps I should say, as the performance of a mystery in which players and author occasionally drop their comic masks to reveal grief and horror, but only for a split second and with the sinister elusiveness of a subliminal message. Anton Vowl, a writer, disappears; his friends search for him and are killed off one by one. Each death occurs just where the character is on the point of enunciating the mystery or 'damnation' that has them all in its grip--just as they are about to speak a word containing the letter E. There is a joyful comedy to the game. The characters, helpless in the lexicographic fate that their author has devised, are not much unlike ourselves, submitted to the fates that write us while we are trying to write them."
--Los Angeles Times

"An absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."
--Time

"That Perec also seems to have been temperamentally allergic to the stultifying uniformity of market culture and branding, which tends to reduce the particularities of experience to manageable (and profitable) generalities, makes him central to our own time. Each of his books is a jarring surprise, irreducibly idiosyncratic and autonomous, and whoever decides to read him will come away not only with a new sense of what is possible in literature, but of how strange and exciting, and how fun, real originality can be."
--The New Yorker