Sphinx, paperback/anne garreta

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 A dark, pulsing romance, tortured and thrilling and sexy, breaking open our preconceived notions of love and writing.

-- Sarah Gerard, Books are Magic (staff pick) 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.

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.