Please join us as we launch the latest Libellula from Proteotypes, the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus. Painting at Dora was written by François Le Lionnais in 1945, months after his escape from the forced labor camp at Dora-Nordlingen. The memoir movingly describes the game (or spiritual practice) he played with a comrade, in order to keep from despair in brutal circumstances. In 1960, Le Lionnais went on to found, with Raymond Queneau, the OuLiPo — the French association of writers and mathematicians dedicated to producing constraints for literary and other sorts of composition, constraints currently practiced and imitated at Proteus Gowanus in the Writhing Society‘s weekly salons.

Painting at Dora has been translated by another member of OuLiPo, Daniel Levin Becker, who will be on hand on the 27th to sign books and chat. Levin Becker is also the author of Many Subtle Channels (Harvard), a portrait of the OuLiPo, and the translator of Georges Perec’s dream-book La Boutique Obscure (Melville House).