Not One Day
by Anne Garréta
Translated by Emma Ramadan
Published by: Deep Vellum Publishing
115 Pages, 5.00 x 8.00 in
- Paperback
- 9781941920541
- Published: May 2017
$14.95
Other Retailers:
Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize
Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards
Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize
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.”
Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the collective. 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, 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 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 book, Not One Day.
Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of poetry and prose from France, the Middle East, and North Africa. She is the recipient of a Fulbright, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and the 2018 Albertine Prize. Her translations for Deep Vellum include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Not One Day, Fouad Laroui's The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers, and Brice Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator. She is based in Providence, RI, where she co-owns Riffraff bookstore and bar.
Winner of Prix Médicis 2002
Recommended in CLMP’s 2020 “Reading List for Pride Month & Beyond”!
Selected by Words Without Borders as one of 8 Queer Books in Translation to Read for Pride Month 2020!
One of Literary Hub's "30 Books We're Looking Forward to" in 2017
"In Not One Day, originally published in 2002 in French, Garréta permits us to inhabit her body through memory, embracing the messiness of desire, not cisheteronormativity." — Cheyenne Heckerman, Anomaly
“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
“Like a skilled performance artist, Garréta… simultaneously inhabits bodies and spaces.” — Youmna Chlala, BOMB Magazine
"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”
“Garréta more or less perfected the post-modern confessional, doing so with a self-awareness that many authors fail to accomplish… Not One Day is a casual revelation; a delight.” — Sean Redmond, fields Magazine
“Deep Vellum has brought out one of the best books I’ve read this year, one whose compact nature contains more room inside than might be guessed from its modest exterior. Happily, Anne Garréta’s ambition is to create books that are not the products of an assembly line.” — Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review“Garréta’s work revolves around dismantling any reflexes we might have, as writers and readers. She roots her intellectualized reflections on desire into the concrete experience of desire, showing how we are simultaneously living and narrating ourselves at the time, and what kind of fictions underpin this constant dynamic.” — A.K. Afferez, Ploughshares
“What is so extraordinary about Garréta’s take on the confessional is the way her formidable intellect braids eros and philosophy together: the women are (di)splayed in alphabetically-ordered vignettes written—and translated—with breathtaking precision and bite. The lovers, for the most part, slip intentionally out of focus, but the desire (or in some cases, the lack thereof) that drives each encounter is always drawn with the clearest of lines. It is ultimately this desire, and the act of remembering, itself, that seem to be the true protagonists of this indispensable, bracing parade. From B*, with her “sensual proclivity for analysis,” to D*, a “typically desirable woman, you saw her in and through the eyes of others,” and H*, “a siren fastened to her chosen rock,” the accumulation pushes us toward the conclusion that the discovery of the other is always also, or perhaps only, a discovery of oneself.” —Heather Cleary, Book Marks
"It will not go where readers expect, and that imbalance is part of the structure of the entire narrative. It is also for those who relish language, particularly the way words can build a foundation for trust, can intimate the unspoken, and can leave you reeling." —Nadia M Sahi, Rainbow Round Table Reviews
Winner of Prix Médicis 2002
Recommended in CLMP’s 2020 "Reading List for Pride Month & Beyond"
Selected by Words Without Borders as one of "8 Queer Books in Translation to Read for Pride Month 2020"
One of Literary Hub's "30 Books We're Looking Forward To" in 2017
Recommended in Flavorwire’s “22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation”
"In Not One Day, originally published in 2002 in French, Garréta permits us to inhabit her body through memory, embracing the messiness of desire, not cisheteronormativity." —Cheyenne Heckerman, Anomaly
“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
“Like a skilled performance artist, Garréta … simultaneously inhabits bodies and spaces.” —Youmna Chlala, BOMB Magazine
"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
“Garréta more or less perfected the post-modern confessional, doing so with a self-awareness that many authors fail to accomplish… Not One Day is a casual revelation; a delight.” —Sean Redmond, fields Magazine
“Deep Vellum has brought out one of the best books I’ve read this year, one whose compact nature contains more room inside than might be guessed from its modest exterior. Happily, Anne Garréta’s ambition is to create books that are not the products of an assembly line.” —Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review“Garréta’s work revolves around dismantling any reflexes we might have, as writers and readers. She roots her intellectualized reflections on desire into the concrete experience of desire, showing how we are simultaneously living and narrating ourselves at the time, and what kind of fictions underpin this constant dynamic.” —A.K. Afferez, Ploughshares
“What is so extraordinary about Garréta’s take on the confessional is the way her formidable intellect braids eros and philosophy together: the women are (di)splayed in alphabetically-ordered vignettes written—and translated—with breathtaking precision and bite. The lovers, for the most part, slip intentionally out of focus, but the desire (or in some cases, the lack thereof) that drives each encounter is always drawn with the clearest of lines. It is ultimately this desire, and the act of remembering, itself, that seem to be the true protagonists of this indispensable, bracing parade. From B*, with her “sensual proclivity for analysis,” to D*, a “typically desirable woman, you saw her in and through the eyes of others,” and H*, “a siren fastened to her chosen rock,” the accumulation pushes us toward the conclusion that the discovery of the other is always also, or perhaps only, a discovery of oneself.” —Heather Cleary, Book Marks
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