Wishes

Translated, with an introduction, by Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall / July 2018 / 6 x 9, 240 pp. / 978-1-939663-33-7 “In the beginning was the pun,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. And so it was that Georges Perec brought the good word to his friends and acquaintances on a yearly basis as an expression of his best wishes for the New Year. Wishes gathers together these ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, originally printed at his own expense in limited quantities. This paean to the pun consists of a series of short prose pieces—alternately humorous, enigmatic, banal, and absurd—each concluding with a list of the everyday bits and pieces of language lying at their root. English proverbs, Latin phrases, the names of composers, jazz artists, filmmakers, crime novelists, and book titles are all fodder for Perec’s homophonic translations in which the meaning of words gives way to their sounds, which in turn generate new meanings (and in turn, new t