Not One Day

Author(s): Anne Garreta (translated by Emma Ramadan )

Novel | Fiction Reductions | Translated fiction | LGBTQI+ | Humour & Satire

Not One Day begins with a maxim: “Not one day without a woman.”


What follows is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, breathtakingly written, exploring the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire. “For life is too short to submit to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women one does not love.”  Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group.


Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.  Winner of Prix Medicis 2002 One of Literary Hub's "30 Books We're Looking Forward to" in 2017

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Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards

Finalist for the 2018 Albertine Prize Finalist for the 2018 French American FoundationTranslation Prize 

 "Winner of the Prix Medicis, this intense collection of Garreta's memories of past loves--written under strict Oulipian constraints--is at times at once tender, bitter, and intimate." -- Literary Hub

"Not One Day is a novel both fluid and complex, crowded and lonely, and rooted in an uncomfortable position." -- Eva Domeneghini "A master of thought and language, an astounding authority and elegance." -- Anne Serre, Marie Claire

One of Flavorwire's "22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation"

Anne F. Garreta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalienne (graduate of France's prestigious Ecole normale superieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garreta 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 hailed by critics in France and the US alike, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator's love interest. 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 Medicis in 2002 for this novel, Not One Day, 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). Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, received her Master's in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris, and recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco. Her translation of Anne Garreta's Sphinx was published by Deep Vellum in spring 2015 and was nominated for both the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Anne Parian's prose poem Monospace was released by La Presse in fall 2015, and her translation of Fouad Laroui's Prix Goncourt story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers was published in spring 2016. Her forthcoming translations of Laroui's debut novel in English The Tribulations of the Last Sjilmassi, and Brice Matthiuessent's Revenge of the Translator will be published by Deep Vellum in 2017.

General Fields

  • : 9781941920541
  • : Deep Vellum Publishing
  • : Deep Vellum Publishing
  • : May 2017
  • : May 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Anne Garreta (translated by Emma Ramadan )
  • : Paperback
  • : Emma Ramadan