In Love Me Tender, Constance Debre chronicles the aftermath of her marriage, when having left her husband for a woman, she loses custody of her young son. In short, discrete sections, and in language that is deceptively plain, she approaches her material with astonishing bluntness and from unexpected angles. It is a stunning read, a surprising page turner I read once through, and the n again.
'Destined to become a classic of its kind' Maggie Nelson
'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years' Olivia Laing, Observer
When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him.
She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with,…
This debut novel follows the narrator, Norma, through a series of amusing and incisive therapy sessions as she wrestles with feelings of oblivion, and elsewhere looks things up on the internet, trying to figure out whether to leave her girlfriend and whether she can even finish the book she is writing. Witty, bold, and moving, this is an audacious, innovative and thoroughly absorbing book.
An "engrossing, affecting, and singular" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world.
While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn’t having it. It’s just Oblivion.
In these very short autobiographical pieces, each one paired with a photograph, Sophie Calle illuminates various small and large moments from her life in Paris and elsewhere, from her childhood through her parents' deaths. I have yet to meet a person who is not enchanted by this thin, endearing, and magical book.
This expanded edition of Calle's 1994 classic features four new tales
First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photobook classic and since republished and enhanced, True Stories returns for the fifth time, gathering a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle, this time with four new tales. Calle’s projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book--part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings--is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic…
A Monster's Notes follows Mary Shelley's monster into the 21 century. Kirkus describes the book as "Utterly astonishing and not to be missed." Entertainment Weekly chose it as one of the ten best novels of the year.
