Vernon Subutex Three

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0857059815
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
"A literary phenomenon" The Times "Despentes' writing is intelligent, outspoken, witty, shocking, propulsive and streetwise" Times Literary Supplement THE FINAL VOLUME IN THE EPIC ROCK AND ROLL TRILOGY BY CULT AUTHOR VIRGINIE DESPENTES Although it means leaving behind the community of disciples who have followed him on his travels and assembled at his raves and gatherings, Vernon Subutex is compelled to return to Paris to visit the dentist. Once back in the city, he learns that Charles, his old friend from his days on the Paris streets, has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his disciples with news of this windfall, it does not take long before his followers start to turn on each other, and his good fortune provokes ruptures in his once harmonious community. Meanwhile, storm clouds are gathering for Aïcha and Céleste: Laurent Dopalet is determined to make them pay for their attack on him, whatever it takes and whoever gets hurt. And before long, the whole of Paris will be reeling in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 2015 and 2016, and all the characters in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a city will be forced to a reckoning with each other. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

Vernon Subutex 1

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374719519
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed trilogy of novels, Vernon Subutex—short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize and the basis for the TV series of the same name. But who is Vernon Subutex? Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly drops dead of a drug overdose, Subutex finds himself launched on an epic saga of couch-surfing, boozing, and coke-snorting before finally winding up homeless. Just as he resigns himself to life as a panhandler, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook takes the internet by storm. The word is out: Subutex is lugging around a bunch of VHS tapes shot by that same dead rock musician—his last recordings on this earth. Soon a crowd of wild characters, from screen writers to social media groupies, from porn stars to failed musicians to random misfits, are hot on Vernon's trail . . . but Vernon is none the wiser. "Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read. Everything about it is contemporary, right down to the fearless woman author who doesn't think of herself as a feminist and gives an impression at least in interviews of habitually killing rapists." —Nell Zink, Bustle, "The Best Books Of The 2010s"

Vernon Subutex Two

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857055835
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
**Sunday Times Best Books of 2018** "Funny, irreverent and scathing" Guardian "Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk rock George Eliot" ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN, author of You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex's gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss' assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him. Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT. THE SEQUEL TO VERNON SUBUTEX 1, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

King Kong Theory

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 155861687X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can’t or won’t obey the rules.

Eastman Was Here

Author: Alex Gilvarry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101981520
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
“Absorbing...Eastman is a riveting...presence who demands to be loved and remembered.” —The Boston Globe An ambitious new novel set in the literary world of 1970s New York, following a washed-up writer in an errant quest to pick up the pieces of his life. One of Esquire's Best books of 2017 (So Far), The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2017, and BuzzFeed’s Exciting New Books You Need To Read This Summer The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer; finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis. His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival dating back to his days on the Harvard literary journal, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America's longest war. Seeing his opportunity to regain his wife’s love and admiration while reclaiming his former literary glory, he sets out for Vietnam. But instead of the return to form as a pioneering war correspondent that he had hoped for, he finds himself in Saigon, grappling with the same problems he thought he'd left back in New York. Following his widely acclaimed debut, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, Alex Gilvarry employs the same thoughtful, yet dark sense of humor in Eastman Was Here to capture one irredeemable man's search for meaning in the face of advancing age, fading love, and a rapidly-changing world. “With his second book, Gilvarry establishes himself as a writer who defies expectation, convention and categorization. Eastman Was Here is a dark, riotously funny and audacious exploration of the sacred and the profane—and pretty much everything in between.” —Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife

Apocalypse Baby

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558618848
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
"Virginie Despentes's Apocalypse Baby kept me up several nights in a row—in part because it's a terrific page-turner, and in part because I was anxious to see how Despentes would sustain her narrative ride. Apocalypse Baby is more than a compelling punk, queerish spin on the noir genre. It is a choral performance that tumbles its readers into the heart of violent spectacle, with all its attendant grief, unease, and unclarity."—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts Apocalypse Baby is a smart, fast-paced mystery about a missing adolescent girl traveling through Paris and Barcelona. She is tailed by two mismatched private investigators: the Hyena, part ruthless interrogator, part oversexed rock star, and Lucie, her plain and passive—almost to the point of invisible—sidekick. As their desperate search unfolds, they interrogate a suspicious cast of characters, and the dark heart of contemporary youth culture is exposed.

Bye Bye Blondie

Author: Virginie Despentes
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558619283
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
In a wrecked modern version of a romance novel, acclaimed French writer Virginie Despentes pokes at the simultaneous ecstasy and banality of love in an age of psychiatry and punk. Gloria lives in seething rage, lashing out at everyone—particularly, a string of bewildered boyfriends—at the local bar. But when her latest explosion leaves her out on the street, she unexpectedly runs into famed television personality Eric Muir. Incidentally, he’s also her teenage boyfriend, and the one who started it all. Once upon a time, Gloria and Eric met while institutionalized, and then became a mascot couple for those homeless and high on a noisy mix of drugs, music, and counterculture. Now, twenty years later, Gloria is enamored by youthful love resurrected and determined to immortalize their story by writing a screenplay. Whisked away to Paris, she’s transformed from a provincial loose cannon into an urbane party guest. But navigating life and love isn’t any easier for the middle-aged. Cutting deep to unearth the marriage of institutional violence and heterosexual relationships, Bye Bye Blondie illustrates how young women are continuously dragged down and neglected, and then dangled false offers of fame in lieu of real, redemptive recognition.

Lady Joker, Volume 1

Author: Kaoru Takamura
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616957018
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 601

Book Description
One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus. Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously after the revelation of a family connection with the segregated buraku community, historically subjected to severe discrimination. Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers. Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by “the Monster with 21 Faces,” Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.

The New Me

Author: Halle Butler
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525505407
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
"[A] definitive work of millennial literature . . . wretchedly riveting." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker “Girls + Office Space + My Year of Rest and Relaxation + anxious sweating = The New Me.” —Entertainment Weekly I'm still trying to make the dream possible: still might finish my cleaning project, still might sign up for that yoga class, still might, still might. I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind. Thirty-year-old Millie just can't pull it together. She spends her days working a thankless temp job and her nights alone in her apartment, fixating on all the ways she might change her situation--her job, her attitude, her appearance, her life. Then she watches TV until she falls asleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of how hollow that vision has become. "Wretchedly riveting" (The New Yorker) and "masterfully cringe-inducing" (Chicago Tribune), The New Me is the must-read new novel by National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and Granta Best Young American novelist Halle Butler. Named a Best Book of the Decade by Vox, and a Best Book of 2019 by Vanity Fair, Vulture, Chicago Tribune, Mashable, Bustle, and NPR

Windows on the World

Author: Frédéric Beigbeder
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007395485
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 15

Book Description
A daring, moving fictional account of the last moments of a father and his two sons atop the World Trade Centre on September 11.