Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse

This is a terrific book, clever and rollicking and inventive and funny and haunting and all those good adjectives. But this edition is terribly disappointing; the text is set in a proportional font, which makes all the "concrete" games and shapes look cheesy. The pages (spoiler alert?) where the text is run together with no spaces between the words, for instance, are significantly easier to read in this edition, and a great deal is lost because of it. Try to hunt down a copy of the first (1971) edition if you can; this edition is a dim shadow of that one. (Hence the 4 stars -- really I'd give this edition much less but it is a five star book and a poor job of keeping it in print is better than none at all.)

my review is short -- a line from a great poem by w.b. yeats: how can you tell the dancer from the dance

The structure of this book is ingeniuous - it's a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book about a 19 year old French Jewish boy coming to the US after his family is killed in the camps in WW2. This means you're immersed in this obsessive story about a guy planning on boying 365 days' worth of toilet paper and noodles and locking himself in a room to write, while the story about the kid is unrolled bit by bit, changed, modified, and improved. The typeography is all over the place, making the confusion even more profound by drawing things with the text, switching fonts, spacing, etc. There's a lot of humor in the obsession of the fictional writer, and the index/discourse at the end of the book is a killer. The writing puts it over the top, but the structure - the whole idea - is one of a kind.