Sphinx (1980)

Sphinx presents us with a genderless relationship between the narrator, a theology student by day and a DJ by night, and A***, a dancer from America. Garréta's first novel, published in 1986 when she was 23 years old and excerpted here, takes us through the layers of this relationship, as the narrator relentlessly courts A*** through a game of hypotheticals, as A*** finally gives in during drunkenness and a dance, as their relationship strengthens in the eyes of the narrator, only to deflate under A***'s chillingly accurate analysis. - Emma Ramadan, Translator, Sphinx

About the Author: Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalien (graduate of France's prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. 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***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent" (she is the second Oulipian to win the award-Georges Perec won in 1978), for her latest novel, Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002).

About the Translator: Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, and received her master's degree in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse in fall 2015, and she completed a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco in spring 2015.

About the Guest Editor: Deep Vellum Publishing is a nonprofit publishing house founded in 2013 that operates under the threefold mission to publish great works of international literature in English translation, to foster the art and craft of translation, and to promote a more vibrant book culture and literary community in Dallas and beyond.

https://rapidgator.net/file/4b7ac14500b021809f59947a5d071834/

http://nitroflare.com/view/217B38A0C3C6BE2/

http://www.filefactory.com/file/3zqo3xecgk1k