One Doug Nufer (see review here) is simply not enough: America needs to read and produce more Oulipian fiction. Even popular fiction benefits when there are brave astronauts far out on the fringes of literature. Without experimental writers testing what language can and cannot do, mainstream literature has no fountain of new ideas to replenish all the hoary old concepts that need retiring.

Do you think there would be a Dave Eggers, for example, without French author Georges Perec to lead the way? Even authors who color outside the prescribed lines of fiction need someone to show them how, and Eggers's experiments with format and content did not erupt fully formed from his brow. Perec's A Void, a novel written without using the letter "e," is often mocked as an example of overindulgence wrapped in a thin concept, but without A Void, Perec never would have written his sprawling, ambitious Life: A User's Manual, which employs Oulipian techniques to great, touching effect.

Two recent Perec reissues, The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, are variations on the same experiment. Boss delves deep into the brain of an employee who wants to ask for a raise. It's a heavily recursive run-on sentence of a book that tries as hard as it can to mimic the baseline processes in our brains. Sample fragment: "you go to see mr x it's one or t'other either mr x is at his desk or mr x is not at his desk if mr x is at his desk it will be quite straightforward but obviously mr x is not at his desk so all you can do is stand in the corridor waiting for him to come in..."

While Boss revels in sameness, Place is a desperate quest for novelty, in which Perec sits at one street corner for three days and tries to document everything documentable about the place and people: "Gestures and movements are made difficult by the rain (carrying a cake-box, pulling a wheeled shopping bag, walking while holding a child by the hand)." Both books are tiny tributes to mundanity, and they inspire the reader to look at everything as a launchpad into intellectual adventure.

It's important for literary adventurers to remember that there is a dark side to this experimentation. French author Edouard Levé was 17 when Perec died, but he carries a Perecian inventiveness in his work. His novel most recently translated to English, Suicide, is written to a friend—real or imagined, Levé never indicates—who committed suicide years ago. It cuts at a reader's heart with its blunt truths: "Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you'll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor," he writes, asking, "Isn't it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life's story starting at the beginning." The experiment that Levé tries here is a cruel one that irreversibly transforms every single word of the book for every reader when they learn about it: A few days after Levé turned in the manuscript for Suicide in 2008, he killed himself. recommended