Sphinx – Anne Garréta

Softback

152 pages

Deep Vellum Publishing

ISBN: 9781941920091

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garreta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language. Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist, LGBT, and experimental literary canons appearing in English for the first time.

Translated by Emma Ramadan, with an introduction by Daniel Levin Becker