Erik Morse
Hervé Le Tellier Since joining the French literary society of the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) in 1992, Hervé Le Tellier, a former mathematician, food critic, and scientific journalist, has taken up the task of investigating what the influential novelist Georges Perec once termed the l’infra-ordinaire (the extremely mundane). A relative late-comer to the group (founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960), Le Tellier has, nonetheless, produced a copious catalog of work—novels, poems, and what some Oulipians cryptically refer to as “exercises”—all the while maintaining an avuncular public persona on France Culture’s successful radio show Papous 
In Spurious, Lars Iyer, a blogger and Maurice Blanchot scholar, explores the absurd and dysfunctional extremes of male bonding. Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer’s portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship. The haunted house has performed a dramatic, if often caricatured, role in the literary and cinematic narratives of the last century. Over time, the once popular “old dark house” tropes were abandoned—or at the very least, relegated to genre fare. Now, in the place of exotic castles and remote mansions (think Walpole’s Otranto or Radcliffe’s Udolpho), apartment blocks, duplexes, tract houses, trailer parks, and roadside motels have become the haunted spaces of the twenty-first century. The contemporary supernatural dwelling is no longer a reliquary of spirits and ghouls, but rather a porous domicile—fractured, urbanized and suburbanized—of other grotesqueries: repressed neuroses; Since its christening in the late 1980s by science-fiction writer K. W. Jeter, the steampunk subgenre has undergone few changes to its gaslight-romance-by-way-of-Wired formula. Along with Jeter, authors James Blaylock and Tim Powers translated the dystopian fables of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick into anachronistic fantasies, replete with images of jet-propelled dirigibles, pneumatic-tube ways, and the eponymous steam engine. Steampunk located itself in the Victorian fin de siècle, where London itself became a character, an industrial metropolis as imagined by H. G. Wells or Arthur Conan Doyle. 
In 1974, two years (or two years and one week, to be more precise) before Georges Perec initiated Life: A User’s Manual, his 700-page magnum opus to the fictional 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, the Oulipian mathematician dedicated a rainy, October weekend to musing in Paris’s real-life Place Saint-Sulpice. Armed with pen and paper (and likely a never-ending supply of Gitanes), Perec attempted to notate every person, object, event, action, and atmospheric modulation as they appeared from varying locations on the square. “What happens,” Perec asks, “when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds?”