Mid-Sentence | All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Daniel Levin Becker with Ed Park and Giovanna Calvino

Sharks as poets and vice versa; novel classifications for real or imaginary libraries; bilingual palindromes;  and other acts of literary acrobatics.

Established in Paris in 1960, the ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or OuLiPo for short, is the workshop for potential literature, a consortium of writers and mathemeticians. It has produced a detective novel without the letter 'e' and an epic poem structured by the Parisian métro system, among other canny experiments in language and form. But the work of the group in its full complexity has never been showcased in English, until now. All That is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963–2018 offers a newly accessible showcase of the group in its historical and contemporary incarnations. It features the fiction, poetry, essays and lectures, internal correspondence, acrobatic writing and structured narratives that have become synonymous with oulipian practice.

Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, moderates this conversation with fellow OuLiPan Ed Park and Giovanna Calvino, Italian literature specialist and daughter of founding OuLiPo member Italo Calvino.

Mid-Sentence presents a series of conversations with groundbreaking literary voices. Indie authors and cult favorites explore the intersections between literature and lived experience.

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.