Short answers, pulled from the story.
Raymond Queneau (the 21st of February 1903 - the 25th of October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, and editor, notable for his wit and cynical humour. He is best known for co-founding Oulipo, for his novel Zazie dans le métro, and for A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a combinatorial work of 10 sonnets producing a near-infinite number of possible readings.
Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, is a literary group that treats formal mathematical constraints as creative tools. Queneau co-founded it in 1960 with mathematician François Le Lionnais, after a conversation that grew out of Queneau's work on A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Queneau served as its president.
Queneau calculated that reading the book 24 hours a day would require 190,258,751 years to complete. The work consists of 140 lines arranged across 10 sonnets, with every line interchangeable, generating a combinatorial total of 100,000,000,000,000 possible poems.
Queneau met the Surrealists in 1924 and briefly joined their circle, but never fully embraced automatic writing or their ultra-left politics. He grew increasingly distant from André Breton and by 1930 co-signed Un Cadavre, a vehemently anti-Breton pamphlet, alongside Bataille, Leiris, Prévert, and others.
Queneau joined the Gallimard publishing house as a reader in 1938, rose to become general secretary, and in 1956 was named director of l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. His own works were published by Gallimard under the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection.
Exercises in Style retells a single simple incident, a man seeing the same stranger twice in one day, in 99 different stylistic variations. An excerpt was published in 0 to 9 magazine, a 1960s publication devoted to experiments with language and meaning. The book demonstrates the range of voices available to any storyteller working with identical material.