Remon Keno (1903-1976) was a French writer, a member of the Goncourt Academy, and the author of numerous novels and collections of poetry, famous for his bold experiments with language. Perhaps his most famous book is Zazi in the Metro (1959). More than ten years after its publication, while preparing the work for reprint, R. Keno wrote in his diary: "How could I write this?" However, this did not prevent the book from taking 36th place among 50 books that were recognized in France as masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. The novel is provocative, comic, burlesque, written in colorful language, light and witty. It combines reality and fantasy, humor and sadness, and its versatility allows for different readings. "Style Exercises" is a virtuoso and fascinating language and stylistic game, a bold experiment in which the same short story is retold in 99 different ways, for which R. Keno resorted to various stylistic and rhetorical techniques. The insignificance of the plot of a short story is intended to emphasize that in this work, language in all its diversity of expressive possibilities is more important than the plot itself.
