Composed of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal," and partly a response to the poetry of Raymond Queneau, this collection explores Jacques Roubaud's many poetic modes. He skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry without abandoning the melancholy playfulness that has defined his lengthy writing career.

A selection of Roubaud's best recent work, "The Form of a City" describes not only Paris, but also its people, its writers (and those of the Oulipo in particular), its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara-to name only a few. (Even the Sun has a speaking role.) There are dramatic abductions, daring rescues, passages in hitherto untranscribed languages (Dog, Grasshopper, Duck), tales of unrequited love, allegorical interludes, poems, a playlet, and much more. (But no suspenders, the author promises.) Finally, there are 79 questions for readers of the novel, to see how closely they've been paying attention-for ultimately The Princess Hoppy is a giddy inquiry into how we read literary works. It is both an old-fashioned tale and an ultramodern hypertext, the oldest and the latest thing in fiction.

... L'art des troubadours a un nom, le trobar. L'origine du nom est controversee, mais il est en tout cas lie au verbe francais trouver . L'art du trobar est un art de decouverte, d'invention les troubadours sont ceux qui trouvent, inventent, imaginent le chant, dans ses differents aspects, qui recouvrent aussi bien la creation formelle, la combinatoire de la canso, que la poesie, la musique et le choix des paroles et arguments de l'amour... . ... On a dit: l'amour est une invention du XIIe siecle. Et si invention de l'amour il y a, les inventeurs en furent les trouveurs, les trobadors. On leur reconnaitra ici, dans cet essai, une invention a la fois plus limitee et plus singuliere, plus particuliere, plus orgueilleuse et plus bouleversante: l'invention, ou decouverte, des troubadours, n'est pas l'amour elle est que l'amour est inseparable de la poesie, est le moteur de la poesie dans le chant. Les troubadours ont invente qu'il est un lien indissoluble: celui qui unit l'amour a la poesie... Ce livre est un hommage aux troubadours et la description de leur art du langage a la fois comme forme de vie et comme recherche, comme instrument et comme passion.