A review by briancrandall
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

5.0

c.f. OULIPO, [b:If on a winter's night a traveler|25415291|If on a winter's night a traveler|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526320076l/25415291._SY75_.jpg|1116802]

Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen's nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb's wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb—before birth: they call that "clinching the pattern." That's exactly what we—trappers and killers—do with our conceptions. [9]