In La Decomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murdered characters from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), told the fate of a character losing the use of language. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator's love interest, A***. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Garreta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. A normalien (graduate of France's prestigious Ecole normale superieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garreta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist, LGBT, and experimental literary canons appearing in English for the first time.Īnne F. 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. Nominated for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize One of Flavorwire's Top 50 Independent Books of 2015 One of Entropy Magazine's Best Fiction Books of 2015 One of Bookriot's 100 Must-Read Books Translated From French 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 and exclusive 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.

Sphinx by Anne Garréta