Vernon Subutex 1

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.

Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.

There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.

Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.

Vesicapiscis details a poetics of self-reflection / self-projection. What cannot be defined is pulled into the body, examined, dissected, regurgitated. Its form is prodded and rearranged. Every word / phrase / sentence is suseptible to mutation. And these mutations inevtiably proliferate onto the speaker's tongues, their throat, deep into their nervous system. Language is a virus, and as such, it must be studied.

Here we are, at the abyss.

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.

Ten stab wounds. An old woman in a pool of blood. A nineteen-year-old neighbor now a murderer. 

Since publishing her first novel in 2018, Constance Debré’s work has exposed the flaws in the social order with dizzying passion and intelligence. Her first-person trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—describes the trajectory of leaving a comfortable bourgeois life as mother and wife employed as a criminal justice attorney to become a writer and lesbian. Her books radically challenge all received ideas of the couple, motherhood, family, and inheritance. 

In Offenses, Debré trains her sights on a single case of inevitably flawed justice that, like hundreds of others like it, reveals the enmeshed culpabilities of the perpetrator, the victim, the place, and the past. In a housing project adjacent to Paris, an unemployed teenager kills his elderly neighbor in order to pay off a drug debt of €450. Writing with impassioned detachment, Debré uses forensic detail to explore the ambient senselessness behind this senseless crime.

There is a geography, Debré writes. We live in a vertical world, you don’t see. A world made of worlds. Not side by side but set concentrically and upon one another. A bit like Middle Age representations of the universe, a bit like Dante’s circles of hell. Each world only communicating with the worlds directly in contact with it and none of the others.

In Offenses, Debré scathingly describes the misery of poverty and the absence of any horizon beyond.

Steak Zine is the new issue of Cake Zine. Cake Zine is a literary print magazine exploring art, history, and pop culture through food.

For this pocket-sized special issue, Cake Zine is setting off into carnivorous territory. Serving up 208 pages of non-fiction and fiction exploring the cultural impact of red meat, including:

The last days of Acropolis, Portland’s beloved strip club-steakhouse, by Sophia June

A profile on the women going viral by eating raw meat online by Ella Quittner

A night at a fictionalized steakhouse kaleidoscoped through the roles of maître d’, bartender, server, chef, and guest, by Leah Abrams, Isle McElroy, Lillian Fishman, Stephanie Wambugu, and Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Examinations of the enduring escapism of Outback Steakhouse and Fogo de Chão by Ruby Robina Saha and Adam Dalva

A trip through Nebraska to trace how historic stockyard closures in the late 1990s have affected those serving up beef in the Beef State, by Jamal Dauda

A wistful look back at a romance fueled by ribeye and red leather booths, by Emma Specter

NDA-risking testimony from a lab tech at a plant-based food start up who went from vegetarian to carnivore in the noble name of research, by AUTHOR REDACTED

Tracing the roots and uncertain future of Hong Kong’s sizzling steak by Madeline Leung Coleman

Plus the steak heists prompting retailers to put meat behind lock and key, the body horror of cannibalist cinema, revisiting molecular gastronomy’s embrace of meat glue, the social tensions behind ordering well-done meat, the trauma of growing up on an Australian cattle ranch, and much more.