Recommendations
Books Like Cent mille milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau
Books for readers who loved the combinatory sonnets and Queneau's founding text of reader-generated literature
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) is the Oulipo masterpiece of combinatory poetry — ten sonnets on pages cut into strips, generating 10^14 possible poems; the founding text of interactive literature. These 8 books share its delight in reader participation, its playful engagement with constraint and combinatorics, and its question of who generates a text.
- 1
Buy on AmazonExercices de style
by Raymond Queneau
The companion text — the same exhaustive combinatory spirit applied to prose style; read together for the full range of the Queneau formal project.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLa Vie mode d'emploi
by Georges Perec
The Oulipo successor — the combinatory principle in its most ambitious prose form; Perec's knight's-tour constraint generates the same quality of inexhaustible possibility that Cent mille milliards makes literal.
- 3
Buy on AmazonIf on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
A novel that makes the reader a character and the act of reading the subject — the closest prose equivalent to the reader-generated quality of Cent mille milliards, in which each reading is a different text.
- 4
Buy on AmazonHouse of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
A text that generates different readings depending on how the reader navigates its footnotes and appendices — the American equivalent of the combinatory reader-choice that Cent mille milliards literalises with its strips.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Unfortunates
by B.S. Johnson
A novel published as loose sections in a box — the British combinatory text contemporary with Cent mille milliards, in which the reader's shuffling determines the order of the narrative.
- 6
Buy on AmazonInvisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Cities that can be read in any order, each a variation on a combinatory theme — the prose version of the same principle as Cent mille milliards; any city can follow any other.
- 7
Buy on AmazonDictionary of the Khazars
by Milorad Pavić
A novel in the form of a lexicon with male and female versions — the European combinatory novel of the 1980s, in which the reader generates meaning by choosing the order and version of reading.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Garden of Forking Paths
by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges's story about a novel that contains all possible plots simultaneously — the philosophical precursor to Cent mille milliards; both are about the text that realises all its combinatory possibilities at once.
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