literature with a schtick

no verbs:

In May 2004 telegraph.co.uk reported that a French author had written a book with no verbs: “Perhaps inevitably, critics have commented unfavourably on the lack of action in Michel Thaler’s work, The Train from Nowhere, which runs to 233 pages.”

“The author… said it was liberating to write without verbs, which he describes as ‘invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature’.”

no “e”:

Gadsby: Champion of Youth. This 1939 novel, available online, contains no “e”s. I can’t even write a descriptive sentence about it without an “e.”

In 1969, Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without any “e,” which has been translated to English (in 1994 as A Void) without any “e”s. This book has been an off and on topic of discussion amongst my friends for years, but a new discovery is his book with

only “e”:

Les Revenentes (1972).

other:

To date, my favorite “novel with a schtick” is David Markson’s *postmodern* Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I, perhaps reductively, would call “a novel in aphorisms.” Also in some ways lacking action (despite its verbs), this book is still pretty engaging. (However, I didn’t find that to be the case in another aphoristic-type work by Markson, This Is Not a Novel.)

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