Praise for Dear Dickhead:
"The volleys between Oscar and Rebecca power the book . . . It's a thrill to hear the characters develop on the page. Both are sarcastic, vulnerable, lacerating, consistently surprising . . . It's also one of the better portrayals of addiction I've encountered in literature, up there with books by Jean Rhys and Leslie Jamison."
―Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing . . . [Despentes's] writing remains highly acute. But it has become more sober, patient and full of emotional suspense . . . Frank Wynne delivers a finely tuned translation."
―Pamela Druckerman, Financial Times "A hilariously profane novel that addresses the complexities of sexual harassment and addiction."
―Dana Spiotta, Vogue "Zoé [offers] blistering polemics that are ferocious, provocative, and often intensely funny . . . [Her] righteous fury is electric, and Despentes compellingly presents her as a casualty of male privilege . . . In
Dear Dickhead, the letter becomes a venue for this kind of ruthless taking stock of one's self through frictive, uncomfortable dialogue with another person . . . Rebecca has a way of whittling complex insights about sex and gender into sentences that have the compressed fury of a two-minute punk song."
―Anahid Nersessian, The New Yorker "Nuanced and redemptive . . . This is the most optimistic novel of Despentes's career. It also may be the most subversive . . . France's most unforgiving dispenser of fictional vengeance upon male oppressors has maintained her cultural edge by meting out grace instead."
―Marc Weingarten, The Atlantic "Frank Wynne swings Despentes's French into confidently contemporary English . . . Despentes pulls it off with a brio that's wholly characteristic . . . The energy of Despentes's voice kept me on her side, and rooting for Oscar, Rebecca and Zoé as they navigated their lives with varying degrees of failure, distress and, occasionally, hope."
―Erica Wagner, The Telegraph "[Full of] lots of highly entertaining Bernhardian rants on the subject of men v. women, generation v. generation, and more."
―John Self, The Guardian "A bitingly humorous conversation about addiction, lockdown, cancellation, and, ultimately, friendship."
–Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
"A rare beast–a literary work that successfully uses an old-fashioned form to speak refreshingly to the current moment . . . A novel of uncommon depth and poignancy . . . Subversive, disruptive, and infused with a punk sensibility . . . [A] triumph."
―David Vogel, Words Without Borders "Epic . . . Brash and provocative . . . [A] riveting exploration of feminism and sexism . . . Readers will be awed."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé come across as real people and their interactions with each other manifestly change them . . . Grounded in real human emotion and experience."
―Kirkus Reviews "Despentes's unsparing directness and fluid style are well served by Wynne's translation; nothing is lost . . . Funny, raw, compelling."
―Library Journal Praise for the Vernon Subutex trilogy:
"The zeitgeistiest thing I ever read . . . I tore through these books the minute they were published . . . These novels with their depth and detail kick TV's sorry ass."
―Nell Zink, Bustle "[Despentes] has produced a bona fide magnum opus . . . doing for Paris what Joyce did for Dublin." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[Despentes] writes wickedly about people watching their privilege evaporate in real time and reacting with the full range of human ugliness . . . What fun."
―Molly Young, Vulture "[The] prose is so powerful, and so perfect, that we forget we're even reading. Opening up [Vernon Subutex] is more like stepping inside a thrilling, pulsing party and getting instantly mesmerized by the whirling couple at the center of the crowd."
―Jennifer Croft, The Los Angeles Review of Books "Masterly . . . [Despentes] resembles, by turns, William Gibson, George Eliot and Michel Houellebecq." ―Chris Kraus, The Times Literary Supplement
"[An] extraordinary act of creation and destruction, a realistic Paris evoked, transformed, and torn apart." ―Nadja Spiegelman, New York Review of Books
"Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk-rock George Eliot with a keen taste for the pitiable innards of her characters: no one else has her slyly penetrating eye, her spiky sense of humor, her razor wit that cuts like wire through the accumulated crud of our age's default thought patterns . . A droll, hilarious, insightful record of our unfortunate times." ―Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
