For anyone who loves the Orpheus myth, here’s Sphinx. There’s a wonderful setting: Paris of the 1980s turned day-for-night by all-hours dance parties that exude mysterious, nearly sacred charm and moral sickness in equal measure. There’s a wonderful romance: two fringe dwellers who live by stoking others’ fantasies and end up lighting uncertain, overwhelming fires within each other. And, possibly what will linger most for those who approach this slim treasure, there’s a wonderful (and very serious) game Anne Garreta plays with her characters’ identities. Like her fellow writers in the Oulipo collective, Garreta sets constraints for her writing that open up her work for a particularly resonant merger of intellectual and emotional content.